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BRAZIL. The only Portuguese-speaking country in South America and the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world, Brazil has been called "a country without a memory" by one of the leading guidebooks. Lack of memory, though, should not be interpreted as lack of history, as the mix of cultures in the country's gene pool is rich indeed, with a complexity and variety that show nowhere more than in the food.

Portuguese seaman Pedro Alvares Cabral was thousands of miles from his stated destination of the Cape of Good Hope when he arrived on 22 April 1500 and became the first European to walk on the land that would be named Brazil in 1511. The treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, had divided up the globe and given all lands known and unknown east of an imaginary north-south line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands to the Portuguese. By 1532, when the first substantial Portuguese settlement was founded, the die had been cast based on Portuguese experiences in Asia and in Africa. Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre notes in The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization that Brazil was "a society agrarian in structure, slave holding in its technique of economic exploitation, and hybrid in composition, with an admixture of Indian and later of the Negro." Almost five hundred years later, these three major groups—Indian, Portuguese, and African—continue to form the matrix threads of Brazil's culinary culture.

Native Influences

French chronicler Jean de Lery's 1770 Histoire d'un voyage fait en terre du Bresil offers insights into the daily life of the native peoples and reminds readers that the women were responsible for much of the agriculture, the management of the entire house, and all of the cooking. Many of these culinary creations are still a vital part of the country's menu. Manioc or cassava (Manhiot esculenta, Manhiot aipi, or Manhiot dulcis) remains a major staple. The bitter cassava tuber, which required time-consuming preparation to remove the prussic acid (also known as hydrocyanic acid), was processed into a meal, which formed the basis of the diet. The liquid was also used and became the basis for tucupi, a condiment of cassava water, garlic, chili, chicory, and seasonings that is still prized today in the Amazon region. The Portuguese colonists at first confused the manioc with the true yam that they were familiar with from Africa. Soon, though, they were eating such Indian dishes as a form of cassava cake known as mbeieu or beiju, a cassava porridge or paste known as mingau, and pacoka or pacoca, a pulverized fish and cassava meal that has given its name to a popular contemporary pulverized peanut and sugar candy. Maize (Zea mays) was known, but never assumed the importance in Brazil that it had in other parts of Central and South America. Fish was also abundant and played a major role in the diet, with the pirarucu (Arapaima gigas) having the place of primacy. Fish was frequently prepared by roasting it in its own fat over a slow fire, then sealing it in earthenware jars. Other varieties of Amazon fish were prepared in this manner as was manatee, which was called peixe boi or ox fish.

Green vegetables were scarce, but nuts were consumed, particularly the cashew, as were the sweet potato, peanut, and cacao. Papaya (Carica papaya) and guava were eaten, as were pineapples. When the Portuguese brought bananas and citrus fruits, they were immediately adopted by the natives. Ripe fruit was eaten raw and green fruits grilled or roasted. Seasoning was done with chili; in fact the Indians were known for their overuse of the fiery capsicum as well as their abundant use of ginger and of lemon. Freyre cites a Jesuit account that cautions that excessive usage of the three resulted in frequent attacks of dysentery. Another of the lasting contributions of the native Brazilians to the cooking of today's Brazil has been the cooking utensils. The mortar, earthenware water jug, and wicker sieve, along with calabash utensils large and small, all hark back to the first Brazilians.

Portuguese Colonization

Portugal at the time of the colonization of Brazil was a nation recovering from a lengthy period of Moorish occupation. Old Portuguese cookbooks like Arte de Cozinha, published in 1692 by "a royal cook," list numerous recipes for "Moorish lamb," "Moorish fish," and the like. The everyday diets of the Portuguese in the years after the Moors fluctuated between feast and famine. The upper classes hovered between the excesses required on religious feast days, when meals had to be provided to royal retainers, rent collectors, and religious persons for show and status, and the far more frequent days when bread and radishes were the norm. For the poor, bread and onions were typical fare, and meals of sardines or other fish were a treat; meat was rarely tasted. Much of the agricultural wealth of the country was maintained in the convents and monasteries.

In the new land, the colonists began to shape their diet with the foods they knew either in their Iberian home or in the Asian and African colonies. They brought figs, citrus fruits, coconuts, rice, watermelon, the pumpkin called Guinea pumpkin (West Indian cooking pumpkin or Cucurbita maxima Duchtre), mustard, cabbage, lettuce, coriander, cucumbers, watercress, eggplant, carrots, and more. Gabriel Soares de Sousa, in his Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587, offers a seemingly exhaustive listing of the plants brought. He adds that a green belt of one to two leagues encircled Salvador and provided much of the fruits and vegetables for the capital. Olive oil, butter, chickens, and eggs all arrived, as did pigs and the art of preserving pork and other meats.

Although the colonists brought an abundance of ingredients with them, they were so preoccupied with acquiring fortunes in the new land that their diets did not markedly improve. All was sacrificed to King Sugar. Cattle were banished because they destroyed the cane, and domestic agriculture was neglected. By the seventeenth century, travelers were astonished to note that large cities had no slaughterhouses as there were no cattle to send to them. The colonists, though, did have a major influence on the cooking pots of contemporary Brazil, not only by transporting and acclimatizing countless plant species, but also by establishing a countrywide culture—that of Portugal, with its abundant use of cabbage and kale, its hearty soups and rich stews, its traditions of grilling, and the Iberian fondness for sweets. (The Iberian "sweet tooth" combines the North African love for sugar and a tradition of intricate confections developed in Roman Catholic convents.) It is to the mother country that Brazil owes dishes such as the dense, rice-filled chicken soup known as canja, the strips of leafy kale greens that accompany the feijoada that is the national dish, and a national taste for meat and potatoes.

African Influence

The African hand in the Brazilian cooking pot completes the triptych, most noticeably in the northeastern states, where the plantation system held greatest sway. There, from virtually the inception of colonization, Africans were in control of the kitchens of the Big Houses. In Bahia, they were from the Bight of Benin and the Sudanese regions of West Africa. In Rio and Pernambuco, they were mainly Bantu. All brought their own tastes in food. The religious traditions of the African continent crossed the Atlantic as well, and in the hands of the Big House cooks, many ritual dishes were secularized and joined the culinary repertoire. The akara, a bean fritter fried in palm oil by the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria, was transformed into the Brazilian black-eyed pea fritter, or acaraje; fon akassa changed only its spelling to become the acaca, and the Angolan cornmeal porridge known as funji kept its name and its spelling as the dishes of the African continent were turned into Brazilian standbys.

African cooks embellished dishes with ginger, chilies, and pulverized cashew nuts and maintained the tastes of coastal Africa in the continued use of dried smoked shrimp and palm oil. They adapted recipes and adopted the ingredients of the new land to create a cooking so unique that the food of the state of Bahia is considered by many the linchpin that connects the cooking of Africa with that of the Western Hemisphere.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, new immigrants joined the cultural mix that is Brazil: Japanese arrived to work on the coffee plantations, Syrians and Lebanese arrived and became shopkeepers and merchants, German and Swiss farmers settled in the southern states, and Italians established themselves in São Paulo. Each group brought its own dishes, and soon stroganoff and sushi, risotto and sauerbraten could claim pages in any Brazilian cookbook. The result is a country where the regional cuisine is as distinctive as it is varied.

Regional Cuisines

The Amazon region still recalls the country's first inhabitants in dishes like beijus, cassava flour crackers that are sometimes flavored with coconut, and pato no tucupi, duck cooked with tucupi, a condiment prepared from cassava liquid with garlic, chicory, and the leaves of the jambu plant, which produce a slight numbing effect on the tongue. The condiment also turns up in tacaca, a soup that also contains dried shrimp and tapioca. Fish from the river abound, with the enormous pirarucu and the flavorful tuncare. Tropical fruits range from the little known, like the guarana (the seeds of which make a highly caffeinated beverage), cupuacu, a relative of cacao, and the fragrant jambo, or rose apple, to the more familiar maracudja, or passion fruit, and cashew. There are also Brazil nuts, called castanha do para.

Culinary historian Luís da Câmara Cascudo claims that the food of the country's northeast region can be broken down into that of Bahia and the rest of the region. The tastes of the rest of the region are simple ones, featuring dried meats called charque, carne seca, or carne do sol. Stewed with beans and served with rice and abundant sprinklings of cassava meal, the meals are as stripped of pretense as the cowboys and hard-scrabble farmers who inhabit the arid inland region known as the Sertao. The rich tastes of Bahia reflect the area's exuberance. The tastes of sugar, coconut, cachaca, chili, and orange-hued palm oil called dende abound in dishes where the African hand is evident. Dishes with the gustatory complexity of vatapa, a puree of dried, smoked shrimp, ground peanuts and cashews, bread crumbs, ginger, chilies, coconut milk, and palm oil, are popular. The acaraje, or black-eyed pea fritter, is traditional street food, often slathered with vatapa, and sweets prepared from coconut, sugar, and tropical fruits are traditional.

The two major cities of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro revel in international dining that knows few borders, with restaurants owned by three-starred Michelin chefs and local notables. Specialties include Rio's Saturday feijoada, the country's national dish of black beans, rice, stewed meats, greens, and sliced oranges. São Paulo offers Japanese fare in the Liberdade district as well as German-style beer halls and rodizio-style churrascarias (Brazilian barbecue), where waiters circulate constantly with a never-ending procession of skewers of meat that is sliced at the table.

The heartlands of Minas Gerais and Goiás are marked by their love of beans. They celebrate with dishes like Tutu a Mineira, mashed black beans served with pork chops and kale, and a version of feijoada prepared with pink beans instead of black ones. Mineros pride themselves on their wood-burning ovens called fogao de lenha and their cheeses, which are prized throughout the country.

The southern states are more European in focus, with large settlements of Italians and Germans. They are also the home of Brazil's gauchos and boast a meat culture centered on spit-roasting meat churrasco-style. The prairies of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso do Sul are made up of huge ranches called estancias or fazendas, where cattle farming is a major industry. Beef, pork, and fish dominate the regional menu, and as settlement increases there, the newcomers are sure to add another chapter to the rich and ongoing history of the food culture of Brazil.

See also Africa: North Africa; Cassava; Central America; Columbian Exchange; Iberian Peninsula; Mexico; Mexico and Central America, Pre-Columbian; South America; Sugar and Sweeteners.

Jessica B. Harris