Hallacas: Unwrapping a Venezuelan Tradition
Text by Jose M. Ripol
Photos by Jorge Acosta
The dish incorporates elements from the three major groups that were brought together as a result of Spanish colonialization and the slave trade: corn masa from the Americas, a baroque stew which includes olives, capers, almonds and raisins from Spain, and plantain leaves that were introduced to the continent by European settlers.
Venezuelan Christmas doesn’t smell like cinnamon, nor does it smell like spruce, peppermint or firewood. It smells, predominantly, like plantain leaves.
Whether in Caracas or in Weston, Florida—in Sydney, Lima, Madrid or New York—Venezuelans, now dispersed around the world, carefully unwrap steamed plantain leaves to reveal a parcel of golden dough generously filled with a complex stew (or guiso). Its name is hallaca, and it is the centerpiece of our Christmas tradition.
In spite of the economic instability, food insecurity and mass migration that has characterized Venezuelan life for the better part of two decades, one thing remains true for its scattered sons and daughters: There’s no Christmas without hallacas. In 2020, Covid-19 accentuated the isolation that many of us feel while celebrating the holidays away from loved ones. Yet whether together or apart, eating hallacas had the power to make us feel connected.
These succulent cousins of the regionally ubiquitous tamal showcase a syncretic array of layered flavors and sophisticated techniques. The dish incorporates elements from the three major groups that were brought together as a result of Spanish colonialization and the slave trade: corn masa from the Americas, a baroque stew which includes olives, capers, almonds and raisins from Spain, and plantain leaves that were introduced to the continent by European settlers after their “discovery” of the vegetal species during prior African expeditions.
“I can’t think of any other Venezuelan dish with a historical narrative of this magnitude,” says Maricel Presilla, James Beard Award winning author of Gran Cocina Latina—a magnum opus of Latin American gastronomy. The history of the dish is shrouded in legend, with accounts that tell the story of how enslaved peoples from the Gulf of Guinea and Angola used scraps from the master’s table to concoct a stew with which to stuff pockets of masa made from freshly pounded corn. Presilla goes on to describe it as a “dish of transition. One that is clearly criollo—a true amalgamation of the many cultural influences that define the country.”
Presilla, who aside from being a culinary expert and restaurateur also holds a doctorate in medieval history from New York University, explains how the dish did not debut as a Christmas tradition, saying that “in its many variations, hallacas were eaten with relative frequency.” However, the period of shortage that followed the Venezuelan War of Independence in 1823 left citizens without the direct supply chain that had characterized the colony’s special relationship with the former Spanish Empire. Hallacas were thus reserved for special festivities—none more important than Christmas for the now-Catholic inhabitants of the region.
Yet, the role of the hallaca in Venezuelan identity far transcends its historical provenance. In spite of following a similar formula, hallacas have the particularity of varying not just from region to region, but from home to home. People from the eastern shores of the country are known to include stingray meat in their version, and pigeon peas are added to the stew by residents of the vast and central grasslands called Llanos Venezolanos.
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Each year in early December, extended family units from all over the country come together to partake in the ritual of hallaca-making. It’s an elaborate episodic process, with a timeframe that typically spans two to three days from start to finish. The endeavor requires assembly lines of family members young and old.
The first step is selecting and readying the ingredients, of which there are upwards of 20. Plantain leaves have to be lightly roasted, cleaned and cut, broths have to be made, lard has to be rendered and infused with achiote seeds, vegetables have to be finely chopped, and meats have to be parboiled and cut up into small pieces. Some Venezuelans forego the comforts of modernity provided by precooked corn flour and choose to make the masa from scratch. For them, the task of soaking the kernels is added to this initial list of steps.
Next is the making of the stew, in which layers of flavor are carefully crafted by incorporating ingredients at different stages. The achiote-infused lard acts as the medium in which the vegetables are sautéed and the sauce is formed—first garlic, then onions, followed by leeks, scallions, peppers, tomatoes, cane sugar, paprika, capers, sweet wine, vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, gherkins and salt—all of which reduce until there is virtually no moisture left in the pot. To this base, the three meats are added (chicken, beef and pork), along with the cuajo—a thickening agent made up of corn flour dissolved in chicken broth or water. It’s a long and sluggish procedure, one that could easily be started at 8:30 in the morning and concluded past 6:00 in the afternoon. The stew is then allowed to cool and macerate until the following day. But that’s not all for day one.
The next task at hand is preparing the sliced onions and peppers, hard-boiled eggs, almonds, olives and raisins—subject to familial variation—that accompany the guiso inside the hallaca. I was one of those kids who would perform surgery on my plate, meticulously extracting all these unwanted garnishes, too brazen for my then untrained palate. Today, the very thought feels sacrilegious.
The following day is relatively less grueling. While the masa for hallacas is slightly different than the one used for the quotidian arepa, kneading it should come as second nature to most Venezuelans. This version is made all the more pliable by the copious amounts of achiote-infused lard that are worked into it. These typically are made by the hundreds so, yes, the amount needs to be copious. The deep orange hue of the achiote gives the masa a vibrancy befitting of the celebration for which it’s made, and chicken broth is used instead of water to further flavor it.
This is where the assembly line comes in to play: One person wipes a plantain leaf with the achiote-infused lard—pass—the next person adds a small amount of masa—pass—the next person flattens into a disk—pass—the next person adds a generous scoop of guiso—pass—the next person adds the garnishes—pass—the next person folds and wraps the hallaca—last pass—at the end of the line, someone receives the bundle and ties it up with white butcher’s twine in a distinctive pattern that plays both a functional and an aesthetic role.
Now, imagine that times a hundred or two.
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When people can gather to make hallacas in an assembly line, one person adds a spoonful of guiso and then passes the hallaca along.
As you may have gathered, making hallacas not only requires a group effort, but a financial one as well. Several of the aforementioned ingredients—notably the olives, capers, raisins, almonds, Worcestershire sauce and sweet wine—aren’t locally produced in Venezuela and have to be imported from their respective ports of origin. For many citizens of a nation battling hyperinflation since 2016, that presents a problem. Nowadays, even the local ingredients are hard to find, and to do so, people often have to rely on black market goods (at black market prices).
Celebrated Venezuelan chef and TV personality Sumito Estevez described the dish as “probably one of the most concrete acts of popular resistance that I have seen in the past 20 years of dictatorship.”
It was not the answer I was expecting from a man who has dedicated his professional life to celebrating the food of our home country. I was prepared for personal anecdotes depicting a similar scene to the one mentioned above, or a cheffy explanation of the complexities of the hallaca. Instead, his answer hit the very core of the national reality.
“Scarcity and inflation are not phenomena of [President] Maduro; they go all the way back to [President] Chavez. Therefore, Venezuelans have grappled with shortages and inflated prices of key hallaca ingredients for at least 10 years, if not more.”
However, in spite of the once-rich oil nation’s steady socioeconomic and political deterioration, there hasn’t been a single year in which Venezuelans haven’t made hallacas in December.
I asked Professor Ocarina Castillo D’Imperio, a gastronomic anthropologist from the Central University of Venezuela, what she thought of Estevez’s description of the hallaca as an act of resistance. She took it a bit further.
“More than the hallaca, the Venezuelan table is the principal space for resistance in this country,” she says. “The very effort that is made across our geography in order to be able to eat—that, it itself, is an act of resistance.”
Her statement conjured images of the long lines that form outside of supermarkets, as well as the empty shelves inside them, which have been commonplace since 2013. It’s an image that contrasts the narrative that you can find everything you need in Venezuelan (black) markets. My family, like many still living in the country, have had to live with that reality ever since. They are lucky enough to have relatives abroad, like myself, who supplement their pantries and medicine cabinets with items as basic as canned tuna and toothpaste.
“People think that resisting is something that is done militantly, but more often than not it’s just done with grief,” Castillo added. “Food in Venezuela implies resistance and resilience.”
In the case of a festive dish that is only eaten one month out of the year, the defiance is more palpable. Citizens may have unwillingly given up many of their civil liberties, but they have yet to relinquish this tradition. They may need to make 40 instead of 150, but they will make them, nonetheless.
Aside from domestic instability, Venezuela’s socioeconomic decline has led to scales of mass migration previously unseen in the region. More than 4 million Venezuelans have fled the country since Hugo Chavez’s rise to power in 1999. That’s roughly 13% of the total national population. My parents acted promptly, perhaps due to my father’s lived experiences as a teenager in Havana when Castro’s revolution began in 1953, and we left when Chavez got elected and I had just turned 11.
“People think that resisting is something that is done militantly, but more often than not it’s just done with grief,” says Professor Ocarina Castillo D’Imperio, a gastronomic anthropologist from the Central University of Venezuela. “Food in Venezuela implies resistance and resilience.”
As immigrants do, Venezuelans have taken their culinary traditions with them wherever they have gone—and hallacas are not the exception. However, such a complicated recipe, especially one that typically relies on a group effort, can be hard to maintain. Many depend on the culinary wisdom of the family elders. They may lend a helping hand when it comes to flattening the dough or adding the garnishes, but the actual, almost alchemical, knowledge of technique and palate is reserved for the few members of the family who show an interest in the process.
That said, there’s almost always someone who will make hallacas to order. One of them is my aunt, Miriam Rodríguez. At 67, she splits her time between her son and daughters, two of whom live in her native Caracas, and one who lives in South Florida. Since 2003, she has amassed a loyal customer base in the suburban city of Weston, home to a large community of Venezuelan immigrants. She tells me, “every year, I sell around 600 hallacas, give or take.” Miriam uses the proceeds of her operation to send money to our family in Caracas.
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Whether homemade or bought, eating hallacas is a group activity—one that has been severely impacted by the migratory reality of leaving behind a multitude of loved ones.
“I always feel a pang on the night of the 24th or the 31st [of December] when I see the empty chairs,” says Castillo, whose son and daughter have both left Venezuela in order to settle down in Mexico. Estevez offered a similar comment, noting that his brother lives in The Netherlands, his brother in law in the U.S., and his three daughters in Argentina, Germany and Canada, respectively—while he and his wife Sylvia have resided in Chile since 2017.
Last year, those empty chairs were all the more evident as Covid-19 continued to rage around the world, thwarting large family gatherings and travel plans for millions.
“This will be the year that I make hallacas on my own for the first time. My aunt and my cousin in Madrid will be doing the same thing,” says Juliana Vásquez, an LA-based life coach who couldn’t join her family in South Florida for the holidays.
All this made me think of something else Estevez said. He spoke of the rite of eating hallacas in Venezuela as an act of national communion, in part due to the country’s singular time zone, explaining that “during the span of an hour or two, practically every Venezuelan is eating the same dish at the same time. It’s something that doesn’t really happen in other countries.”
However, those of us who live abroad—like Sumito in Santiago, me in Brooklyn, and the millions of others scattered around the globe—will, instead, form a familiar Christmas chain reaction that predates this newfound Covid-19 isolation. The butcher’s twine will unravel and the plantain leaves will unwrap, one by one, crossing national borders and time zones, wherever Venezuelans gather for the holidays. Because, as Castillo put it, “food is a more resistant barrier than geography. More resistant than language.”
Be it in-land or abroad, hallaca-making always represents a challenge. Each year, we take it on.
