Casado Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The casado is Costa Rica's standard plate lunch: white rice with beans, meat, fried plantain and a little salad, all arranged together on one plate. It is served as the midday meal in the small eateries known as sodas and at home.

Beans, the mainstay of the plate, are a New World crop long established in Central America, on people's tables from far back. Rice, the other foundation, was brought here in the colonial period and had spread through Central America by the mid-sixteenth century at the latest. Both beans and rice, then, were long since at hand as building blocks for a twentieth-century dish.

What is younger is the way of eating: arranging the assembled ingredients together on a single plate. This plate-lunch format appears in the eateries of the capital, San José. The style of serving rice, beans, meat, fried plantain and salad together took shape as a workers' midday meal in the 1960s. Within that setting, a cheap and filling meal for laborers, the casado found its outline as a plateful with the range of dishes of a home-cooked meal.

Casado means "married man" in Spanish. Why should an ordinary plate lunch of rice, beans and meat be called "the married man"? Two folk etymologies for the name still circulate side by side in Costa Rica.

One likens it to a married man's meal. Single laborers gathering in the sodas of San José wanted a large, well-rounded plate like the meals a wife would prepare at home; it looked, people said, as though a settled married man (casado) were eating at home, and so the name stuck. This is the best-known etymology, tied to the workers' lunch of the 1960s, when the plate-lunch format took hold.

The other sees the ingredients themselves as "married" on the plate. White rice with beans, meat, fried plantain and salad drawn together on one plate is likened to the ingredients wedding one another (casados). It is a competing play on the same word.

Both stories have their charm, but which is true has not been established. Both etymologies began to be told only in the later twentieth century, and none has been accepted as a settled explanation. Costa Rica's newspaper La Nación and the Spanish-language encyclopedia alike present these accounts side by side without declaring a winner. Other sayings circulate too, and the origin of the name remains a matter of several accounts standing together.

The dish's own timing, by contrast, wavers less than the name. The plate-lunch format took hold in the sodas of San José in the 1960s, a date on which the newspaper record and the Spanish-language encyclopedia broadly agree. The origin of the name cannot be settled, but when this plate found its place at the midday table can be seen with fair confidence; that is the honest state of the casado today.