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Traditional food and drinks

Spanish cuisine brought to Colombian soil the influences of its various nationalities and those of the Arab world. He contributed a diet based on the consumption of rice, beans, stews, meats, milk and its derivatives, eggs, bread and Galician broth. By merging with other cultures, he added pork and beef to the aboriginal root ajiaco, and then viands of African origin. From Spain, the art of making wines was learned, many times by hand in homes, from the nectar of tropical fruits and rice.

African culinary traditions are present in Colombian cuisine through the preparation of congrí, okra, rice with chicken, yam with mojo, chilindrón de chivo, plantain in its different forms, sauces, fried foods and the introduction of new variants in the preparation of the ajiaco: plantain, yam and pumpkin that ended up displacing the pepper, which had given it its name.

Among the favorite drinks of the black slaves of the Álava mill was the chequeté, made with toasted corn (2.5 pounds), 6 liters of coconut water, 3 liters of sour orange juice and half a bottle of brandy. This mixture was placed in clay or glass covered with fine cloth and water, and they ingested it 45 days after the process began, a tradition that continues today in several of its descendants.

Chinese immigration made known in the town, through its food and vegetable stalls and the 141 businesses that came to control before 1959 with a minimum capital of 111 208.65 pesos, their ancestral tastes for fruits and vegetables, fried foods , varied sweets and cold cuts, roasted peanuts and fried rice, the latter adapted to the Caribbean palate.

The mix of these cultures shaped the Colombian culinary art, which today has 16 traditional dishes: guengueré, caper vine, cod or smoked salted fish, coquito prieto amelcochado, flour tamale with pieces of smoked pork wrapped with orange leaves, the Chinese cundiamol, the raw sweet potato bread, the raw cassava fritter, the okra to the colombina, the black beans to the red snapper, the ajíaco to the colombina, the soup from Matanzas, the frangollo, the chicuá, the Colombian olive and the Uruguayan or typical Colombian steak.

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