The Portuguese founded Salvador (Bahia) in 1549 as the capital of colonial Brazil, creating a major Atlantic port city where European, African, and Indigenous lifeways—including food traditions—came into sustained contact.
Black-eyed peas (cowpeas) were introduced to Bahia during early Portuguese colonization (commonly dated to the 16th century). They became a key ingredient in acarajé and related Afro-Bahian preparations.
By 1558, Salvador functioned as an early large slave market linked to sugar plantations. Enslaved Africans carried agricultural knowledge, ingredients, and cooking techniques that would later blend with Indigenous and Portuguese practices in Bahia.
African oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), the source of azeite de dendê, became established in Bahia by the 17th century. Its spread laid a core foundation for Bahian “comidas de dendê” and Afro-Brazilian ritual cuisines.
Moqueca developed as a regional stew with layered influences: Indigenous cooking foundations and local ecologies combined over time with African ingredients (notably dendê) and Portuguese colonial foodways, producing the Bahian style associated with dendê and often coconut.
During the colonial period, Black women—enslaved and free—sold prepared foods in Salvador through practices often described as “ganho” (earning income in the streets). This helped consolidate recipes and public tastes around foods made with dendê, including acarajé sold from tabuleiros.
Research on Bahia’s “Dendê Coast” emphasizes that dendê became both a food staple and a cultural-religious resource in Afro-Bahian life, with palm-oil landscapes and knowledge sustained over centuries despite elite neglect and later development pressures.
Candomblé developed in Brazil during the 19th century and coalesced strongly in Bahia. Offerings and festival foods—including dendê-based dishes—became central to religious life, reinforcing culinary lineages tied to African, Indigenous, and local Bahian practice.
Ilê Axé Iyá Nassô Oká (Casa Branca/Engenho Velho) is commonly dated to around 1830 and is among the earliest documented Candomblé terreiros in Salvador. Such institutions helped preserve and transmit Afro-Bahian food knowledge alongside ritual practice.
Brazil abolished slavery nationwide with Law No. 3,353 (Lei Áurea), signed on 1888-05-13. Emancipation reshaped labor, markets, and urban street economies in Bahia, while Afro-Bahian culinary traditions continued as key vehicles of community identity and religious continuity.
On 1890-12-14, a directive signed by Ruy Barbosa ordered slave-sale records destroyed; burnings occurred in 1891. This action complicated later efforts to document enslavement histories, affecting how Afro-descendant families could trace pasts intertwined with food labor and street vending.
In 2005, IPHAN recognized the Ofício das Baianas de Acarajé as Brazilian cultural heritage, formally valuing a craft that preserves Afro-Bahian culinary and religious knowledge centered on dendê-based foods like acarajé, vatapá, and caruru.
Afro-Indigenous foodways and the development of Bahian cuisine in colonial Brazil (c. 1600–1900)
