Bandeja paisa Period BOrigin theory CVerified

The bandeja paisa is a set meal from Colombia's Antioquia region, whose people are the paisas. Built around a stew of red kidney beans, it gathers white rice, fried pork skin (chicharrón), grilled meat, sausage, a fried egg, fried plantain, avocado and an arepa onto one large platter, the bandeja.

The beans, rice and pork that fill the platter were brought from the Old World in the colonial period, but each had long since settled into the region as everyday food, and the ways of cooking them, simmering beans, frying meat and pork skin, boiling rice, had long belonged to these mountain kitchens. With those ingredients and skills in place, a new form appears: serving them all together on one large platter.

Its forerunner is the seco antioqueño, the packed meal that arrieros, the mule drivers, carried from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Rice, beans, meat, fried food and plantain with an arepa, this working meal sustained farm labour and the mountain freight trade. It was carried into the world of tourism and promotion, and on restaurant plates it grew larger, its colours arranged, until it was set out as a large-platter meal. The bandeja paisa emerged as a national dish only after passing through this mid-twentieth-century reworking.

This dish is often described as a country food that Antioquian farmers had eaten since colonial times. But the present large-platter form does not appear in the nineteenth-century costumbrista writing that recorded local customs in fine detail. That the form is absent from the records of its own supposed era shows that the platter as we know it can be no older than the mid-twentieth century (Señal Memoria / RTVC). The anthropologist Julián Estrada calls it an 'exaggerated' dish built up by Medellín's tourism promotion.

The details, though, are still argued over. One account holds that the name 'bandeja paisa' was coined not in Antioquia but in the capital, Bogotá, around 1950, when the existing 'seco' was promoted through the hotel and tourism association Cotelco (El Tiempo / Radio Nacional de Colombia). Another, argued by Estrada, treats the present form as the creation of Medellín's tourism office, sold in 1960s restaurants and 1970s Turantioquia tourist lodges and spreading from there. Where and when the name arose, the two accounts do not converge, and the question is still unsettled.

The distinction worth keeping is that the making of the name and the making of the dish's forerunner are separate matters. The muleteer's packed meal, the seco antioqueño, is old; the enterprise of selling it as a large-platter meal and calling it 'bandeja paisa' is a product of mid-twentieth-century tourism. Not confusing the two is the key to reading this dish's history correctly.