Whose Arepa Is it Anyway?

By Giuseppe Lacorazza

The arepa de huevo is a traditional street snack of the cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena, one that has a very clear coastal identity. Photo courtesy of Jdvillalobos, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

In the 1950s, the psychologist Henri Tajfel proposed what he called the Social Identity Theory, which suggested that people identify themselves using a series of specific actions: We seek to improve our self image, we categorize ourselves and the people around us, and we constantly compare groups and people. What it means is that we tend to favor those whom we consider part of us over them. 

Every time we place ourselves within one of these collectives—whether it is an identity, a family or a football team’s fan base—we build walls to separate what belongs and what doesn’t. Those limits and parameters are infinite and arbitrary, because we all belong to many of them. I don't know how most of them are chosen, but I recognize that sometimes they do more to separate communities than they do to bring people together. 

In the food community, the discussion of the identities of recipes, ingredients and techniques has acquired a significant role in recent years. It’s a cultural conversation born out of necessity, however an inconclusive one, that sometimes falls into the mermaid chant of capitalism and the bright stage of social media politics. History, though, is an important part of representation, and it must be discussed. 

I write all of this to share a quote from an essay I found on the internet a few months back titled “Influencia gastronómica árabe en Colombia,” or “Arabic Gastronomic Influences in Colombia,” and written in 2014 for the Hanan Al-Mutawa Arab Cultural Center of Zipaquirá, Colombia, by Ivonne Bohórquez Castro. I will translate it for you: 

Among these foods, one of the most important and well-known is the arepa de huevo, a miscegenation of a Tunisian dish brought by a group of Syrians and resurfacing in the Colombian coast with a new name, better flavour and different texture. In the Arab culture it is known as Brick bill Iham.

The arepa de huevo mentioned is a dish from northern Colombia that consists of a corn dough disc that is deep-fried until it puffs up. It is then stabbed on the side, filled with a raw egg and sometimes stewed ground beef, and deep-fried again until it’s golden brown and crispy, with the egg cooked and hopefully a runny yolk inside. It’s a traditional street snack of the cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena, one that has a very clear coastal identity. 

What the essay implies is that the origin of one of Colombia’s most representative street foods—one loved and eaten all over the country, maybe the most culinarily complex and without a doubt among the most delicious—is far, far away from its birthplace. 

A quick Google search showed me that, indeed, the Tunisian brick filled with egg, apparently one of the more popular snacks over there and in Algeria, appears a lot like the arepa de huevo of my hometown of Barranquilla, both in looks and preparation. The main differences—and these are significant—are that the brick is wrapped in a thin, stretchy wheat dough and the arepa is made with a thicker, brittle corn dough, and that the arepa is deep-fried once in very hot oil, then filled with the raw egg and deep-fried again, while the brick’s egg is wrapped in the pastry before everything is dumped together into the oil bath. 

I don’t know if this connection is true, but I love it, because not only it makes me think that I owe a little part of my traditions to Tunisia, a country whose eating habits I’m completely unaware of, but it also highlights how important it is to question the origin of any dish, or tradition, or thing, that we might consider ours. As much as identities are a necessary construction, destroying them is just as paramount. 

Now, it looks like Tunisia and Algeria are part of the rich culinary heritage of Barranquilla, as much as the original precolonial residents, and the Spanish, enslaved Africans, Syrians, Lebanese, Palestinians, Italians, French, Germans, Chinese and others who came after. 

For context, after Colombia’s independence the city of Barranquilla became the country’s main commercial port and flourished faster than any other from the 1850s to the 1950s. Because of this, a big influx of immigrants occurred, with Italians, Germans and French opening shops, Chinese arriving to work in infrastructure and restaurants, and Arabs spreading throughout the coast and the Magdalena delta, working in the commerce of household items, technology and jewelry, as well as cooking. 

But the story of the arepa de huevostarted a long time before that. By the first quarter of the 17th century, the Franciscan chronicler Fray Pedro Simón had already documented the use of eggs with the corn cakes that the indigenous called arepas, but those were “in the form of a thin tortilla, cooked at tamed fire (...) abundant with eggs, fat and other things on top,” very different to the deep-fried and stuffed version that would be created later.

The arepa de huevo consists of a corn dough disc that is deep-fried until it puffs up. It is then stabbed on the side, filled with a raw egg and sometimes stewed ground beef, and deep-fried again until it’s golden brown and crispy, with the egg cooked and hopefully a runny yolk inside. Jdvillalobos, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

According to the Colombian historian Enrique Morales Bedoya, in his excellent book Fogón Caribe: La historia de la cocina del caribe colombiano, the Arab immigration to Colombia began after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Those immigrants mostly came from Syria, Palestine and Lebanon, Algeria and Tunisia having separated from the empire many decades before. 

It’s possible that, as Bohórquez wrote, the 20th century wave of immigrants had learned and taken the recipe with them to America. That was the case with many others that eventually became part of northern Colombia’s culinary landscape, like the suero costeño (a delicious riff off of labne), the quibbes, the deditos de queso (battered and fried cheese sticks), the empanadas de leche cortada (even more similar to the brick but filled with suero and beef), the black-eyed pea fritters (clearly stemming from falafel), the uses of eggplant, sesame sweets, grape leaves, stuffed cabbage and many, many more. 

Upon arrival to the Colombian coast and along with the staggering heat of the Caribbean sun, the vast sea, bloody battles and business opportunities, the immigrants found the already established criolla cuisine, which owed equal parts to the pre-Hispanic communities, the formerly enslaved Africans and the Spanish conquistadors. The use of corn to make arepas was ingrained in the land by the several Indigenous communities that lived there before anyone else, and according to the same Bedoya, the use of the cauldron with abundant oil for deep frying was already—and still is—very popular, and it’s a direct input from West African cooking. 

The arepa de huevo’s stuffing is where the dispute may arise. Besides the claim that the egg inside of the fried dough comes from the Maghreb, there is also the theory that it comes from the Andalusian empanadas, which are round and stuffed, although not fried, and arrived to Colombia with the Sephardic Jews who were expelled from southern Spain and Portugal in the 15th and 16th centuries. From there, perhaps, stems Cartagena’s name for the snack: empanada de huevo. 

Lacydes Moreno, the proponent of that theory and one of the most influential food writers in the Colombia’s history, described it like this: “[...] the blistering under the hot lard temperature of a yellow corn arepa might have been a possible culinary accident, just like the pommes souffles [...]” The accident could’ve come from many directions.

Let’s remember that Andalusia was a Muslim-ruled area for over 700 years, up until their expulsion—along with the Sephardic Jews—in 1492. Some crossed the Atlantic, most fled to North Africa and the Arab states—from where a few sailed to Colombia 450 years later. In that circuit, perhaps, lies another part of this story. History may become myth, and there the truth will hide.

So truth or not, myth or fact, I choose here in my text my own verdict, that the so-Colombian arepa de huevo does come from the Arab lands of the Maghreb, as much as it comes from the cooking traditions of the West Africans taken by force to the shores of the Caribbean, and from the peoples of the coastlines of the Magdalena River in Colombia where corn was already domesticated before any of this happened. But I also choose to believe it comes from the Sephardic Spanish who gave it their second name, and from the colonial city of Cartagena and the multiculturalism of Barranquilla, where I was born, and hence it's part mine as much as it is from all of the above. 

In this way, I can sense that we all share an identity, a shifting and undeterminable one that brings us closer together because it reveals that, going back far enough in history, everything that is mine is also someone else’s. Might be from someone as distant and different from me as Tunisia is from Colombia.