Chimichurri Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Chimichurri is an uncooked green sauce built on chopped parsley, mixed with oregano, garlic, red wine vinegar, oil, and chili flakes. In the Río de la Plata region of Argentina it is inseparable from the asado, the meal of beef grilled over charcoal.

Its ingredients were all long-established local ones. Parsley, oregano, garlic, and vinegar could be had in 19th-century Argentina. Chili, though a New World crop, was native to the Americas and equally close at hand here. Chopping fresh herbs and dressing them with oil and vinegar calls for no special equipment and no heat.

The sauce took root alongside the spread of the asado, the ritual of putting beef to the coals. Over the 19th century, as the gauchos of the cattle-raising Pampas made charcoal-grilled beef a way of life, chimichurri settled in as the relish set beside the grilled meat. It is a comparatively recent sauce that moved in step with the growth of modern Argentine ranching and its culture of beef.

When it comes to the name, chimichurri comes wrapped in several amusing tales with an English accent. An Irish immigrant, Jimmy McCurry, is said to have devised the sauce in the late 19th century, his name slurred into chimichurri. Or the word is a garbled 'Jimmy's curry.' Or it began as 'give me curry,' an English plea for a curry. Each is the kind of story that is easy to repeat.

No contemporary record of any of these tales has been found, and the names and phrases alike are folk etymologies attached after the fact. Early in the 20th century, two dictionaries set out to collect the vocabulary of Argentina: Tobías Garzón's Diccionario argentino of 1910 and Lisandro Segovia's Diccionario de argentinismos of 1911, published little more than a decade after the sauce's supposed invention. No entry for chimichurri has turned up among the headwords of either. A food blog that charts the sauce's history places the name's appearance in literature in 1950 and in cookbooks in 1958, and notes that a similar sauce in an 1881 cooking almanac went by the name adobo. The sauce itself seems to have reached the table first, with the name chimichurri entering the written record only later.

So where does the name come from? Dictionaries and encyclopedias that offer a possible source point to Basque. One account derives it directly from the Basque tximitxurri, 'a jumble'; another runs it from the Basque zurrumurru ('rumor, murmur') through the Spanish chirriburri ('uproar'). Either would fit the heavy Basque settlement of Argentina and Uruguay in the 19th century. The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), however, gives the origin only as 'uncertain' and says nothing of Basque. Where the word comes from remains unsettled.

Whichever account wins out, the name is a separate matter from the way the green sauce grew up at the asado.