Pão de queijo Period COrigin theory CVerified

Pão de queijo is a wheatless Brazilian bread made from cassava starch (polvilho) worked into the dough and studded with cheese. Baked into a small, ping-pong-ball-sized round, it has a thin, dry crust and a distinctive elastic chew from the starch. It has long been eaten as a breakfast or afternoon snack, above all in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais.

Cassava, the leading ingredient, is a long-established South American crop that was on Indigenous tables from early on. Its grated, water-washed, dried root starch is polvilho. According to food specialists, polvilho came into culinary use around the middle of the eighteenth century, about 1750, and was first baked into biscuits made from the starch (National Geographic Brasil, 2024).

The other ingredient, cheese, took root in the hills of Minas along with the cattle-raising the colonial period introduced. Research by Embrapa records that dairying and the cheese trade in Minas began in the eighteenth century and strengthened through the nineteenth, and that by the 1920 agricultural census Minas accounted for roughly two-thirds of all cheese production in the country. After slavery was abolished in 1888, Minas became the country's dairy heartland and cheese turned into an everyday product of the farmhouse. This abundant Minas cheese meeting the starch dough is how today's pão de queijo is thought to have taken its present shape.

The method itself is plain: polvilho mixed with hot water, fat, egg and grated cheese, shaped by hand, and baked in an oven. Bread once baked in farmhouse kitchens was carried in time to the towns and became part of the urban breakfast table. The name and the method first appear clearly in writing only in the twentieth century — reportedly in a home cookbook of the 1940s, then spreading as a shop-bought item through the 1950s and 60s. It reached the whole of Brazil only later still, in the 1970s.

Just when it was born stays open, somewhere between the close of the nineteenth century, when dairying flourished, and the first half of the twentieth, when the record turns solid. For now, what can be said is only that it dates from around when cattle filled the Minas hills and cassava starch had become a kitchen staple.

Ask in Brazil where this small bread comes from, and the answer that comes back is almost always the eighteenth century. In gold-rush Minas Gerais, wheat was hard to come by, and enslaved African women working the kitchens of the great houses are said to have worked cassava starch at hand into a wheatless bread — a well-known origin story bound up with Minas pride.

Yet no record from that time telling of this episode has so far been brought forward. In an August 2024 column in Estado de Minas, the food historian Carolina Figueira sets out what researchers have noticed. Mônica Chaves Abdala found a "considerable absence" of the dish in historical documents, and asked whether it might be a recent invention — a tradition perhaps coined out of later memories and chronicles. Studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century sweets and snacks in Minas (quitutes) by Sônia Maria de Magalhães and Maria do Carmo Pires likewise show how rarely it turns up. The same column notes that European naturalists and travelers who went through Minas Gerais say they tasted the dish only in the capital, though it does not say which travelers these were or when they wrote. It closes by saying that no one knows the origin precisely.

The eighteenth-century story is also told in another form, one without enslaved women at its center. Vani Fonseca, a food specialist at Senac MG, says that around 1750, when polvilho came into use, farms in Minas were baking biscuits from the starch; cheesemaking had begun on those farms early in the eighteenth century, and on weekends the leftover cheese was worked into the biscuit dough (National Geographic Brasil, 2024). She does not cite a source for this account either.

Still, a thin record does not by itself pin down a birth year. Abdala, too, stopped at asking whether the dish was recent; she did not show when it began. What can be said with confidence is that the dish came after polvilho came into culinary use (around 1750, according to Fonseca). Its name and method are said to appear clearly in writing only in the twentieth century — in a home cookbook of the 1940s, then through commercial spread in the 1950s and 60s.

The view that today's cheese-laden form settled at the end of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, rests on evidence from the cheese side. Research by Embrapa tracing the growth of Minas dairying and the cheese trade, and the region's rise to national dairy center after the 1888 abolition of slavery, explains well enough the conditions under which abundant cheese could have been worked into the starch bread. But that is a story about surrounding conditions — no document from nineteenth-century Minas stating that the dish itself was being baked then has yet been identified.

So a story reaching back to the eighteenth century and a view that places the dish in the late-nineteenth-century growth of dairying stand side by side, and for neither has a document from the time recording the dish itself been identified. Nothing here is settled, and the date of origin stays open within a span running from the close of the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth. The people of Minas who say they have "always" eaten this bread have, for now, no identified source that can say just when that "always" begins.