The seco is a stew typical of Ecuadorian cuisine. It can be made with any type of meat. According to the Dictionary of Peruvianisms of the Peruvian Wings University, seco is a "stew of beef, kid or another animal, macerated in vinegar, which is served accompanied by rice and a sauce of ají, huacatay and cilantro". Thus, its main characteristic is to marinate and cook the chosen meat with some type of sauce acid, such as chicha, beer, naranjilla or vinegar.

The place where it was created for the first time is not known exactly. According to culinary researcher Gloria Hinostroza, the origin of this stew lies in the seco tajine, North African dish made from lamb. His brother, the journalist and gourmet Rodolfo Hinostroza, agrees that the origin would be in the tajine carried by slaves from North Africa who traveled to the Pacific coast of South America during the early years of the Viceroyalty.

There are references that indicate that it could be a stew known in Peru and Ecuador as early as the 19th century, during his visit to Peru, the anthropologist German Ernst Wilhelm Middendorf stated that:

They are called dry dishes in which chicken or kid meat is sautéed in a thin, spicy broth together with yellow potatoes. There are many stews that are prepared in a similar way [...] Some nuns are very expert in their preparation [...] All these stews have to be sautéed or stewed over a high heat over low heat, to be fully penetrated by the spices, which taste much better than they appear [...] Actually, the external appearance is sometimes inapparent, but this is a fault that could be easily corrected, if tried.

A recipe for seco de cabrito, a typical dish of the gastronomy of the north coast of Peru, already appears in the New Peruvian Cooking Manual of 1926. In the 1930 book Chronicles of Old Guayaquil, Modesto Chávez Franco reports that the dry chicken was already prepared in Ecuador since the beginning of the 19th century.

There is no consensus on the origin of the name of this dish. It is popularly thought that when cooking the stew the water must evaporate until it reaches a degree of dryness, hence it must be "seco", although in reality all the variants of "seco" are usually quite juicy, and that the name "seco" is an ironic way of calling a soupy dish.

One of the most widely accepted references is that the name seco comes from the Santa Elena Peninsula, where at the beginning of the 20th century oil works were carried out in the Ecuadorian town of Ancón. At that time, Creole deer and goats abounded (in fact, the dried goat is native to the Guayas Province) and a stew was prepared with them very simple that was accompanied by red rice, as in Ecuador it is customary to serve lunch with a soup of starter and a main course called the "second course" to which the English workers would say "second", which, by derivation, led to "seco".

However, this is a myth, since, according to Modesto Chávez Franco in his Chronicles of Guayaquil, there are records of this dish from 1820, almost a century before the English presence in the Santa Elena Peninsula.