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| Moqueca de Camarão |
Onde canta o sabiá.
As aves que aqui gorjeiam
Não gorjeiam como lá.
My land has palm trees
Where the thrush sings.
The birds that here sing
Do not sing as they do there.
(from “Song of Exile,” by Gonçalves Dias, 1843)
BEFORE THE AMERINDIAN ARRIVED
The earliest inhabitants of the coast of Rio de Janeiro arrived approximately six thousand years ago. They foraged; hunted small animals; and took mussels, oysters, and different kinds of shellfish from the sea, which they cooked in small fires. They disposed of the shells and bones in the same places they buried their dead. Archaeological excavations have discovered that they likewise put the remains of small animals they hunted, such as turtles, monkeys and other mammals, and small fishes in these places.
Cassava plant fossils have also been uncovered, suggesting incipient agriculture. After a while, all these remains, solidly stacked with shells, formed mounds, and as they dissolved with the passing of time, their high lime content preserved all their contents. Judging by the locations of the shell mounds, these groups lived in an area stretching from the north of the State of Rio de Janeiro to the south of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil. The next inhabitants of the region, the Tupi, called them sambaquis (shell deposits). They were sedentary people who settled in small groups, and became known as sambaqui people.
Ceramic pots were recovered at some of the shell mounds, and although there is no proof the sambaqui culture produced kilns or were potters, these indicate that there might have been occasional contacts with other groups from inland. Archaeologists also uncovered stone figures in these deposits. Today it is known that they lived at sites in modern-day downtown Rio, as archaeological finds in the harbor zone tell their whereabouts inside the city; unfortunately, over the centuries many were excavated for their lime deposits.
The Amerindian groups that the Europeans encountered when they arrived in Rio had settled in the area much later than the sambaqui people, approximately two thousand years ago, having moved out of the Amazon River basin, from the north. Instead of settling along the shores, they spread like a fan, establishing themselves from the coast inland to central Brazil.
These new arrivals were potters, and they knew fire and how to use it to create ceramic pans in which to cook food; the pans were placed on three stones set over the fire. Fire also had magical purposes, used for speaking with the spirits, understanding and healing a sickness, and lighting a pipe of tobacco in a ceremony. In addition, it was a very powerful weapon used to scare their enemies. When enemies where captured they were sacrificed in cannibalistic rituals.
The two Amerindian peoples around the Guanabara Bay were the Tupinambás and the Temininós . They lived around the bay in well-positioned villages from which they could watch the entrance of the bay or on islands well offshore. Knowledge about these groups has accumulated over the centuries, starting with the first contacts with Europeans and later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reports. Gaps about their life in the archaeological record are filled by interpolations of similar habits of other groups around this area; implements found at archaeological excavation sites; or ad hoc finds at construction sites, private collections started in the nineteenth century, and public collections. It is from these that one learns that the quality of their ceramic was not very refined, but it was richly decorated, according to archaeologist Maria Beltrão.
Brazil has a long tradition in ethnology beginning in 1808 with the Royal Museum in Rio de Janeiro, and before that with the many objects that were taken to Europe where they survive in national collections. Therefore, a cumulative knowledge has helped to build a rich image of who the Tupinambá and the other groups around them were. Together with the vestiges of their material culture, there is their food legacy in the reports about the preparation of fruits, vegetables, roots, and animals of the Atlantic Forest both by contemporary travelers and by the maintenance of these in the cuisine of Rio’s population today.
The travelers’ reports, because they were confronting a new world, sometimes include a little more than just a list of items in the region; they tell how the natives behaved, if they were friendly, if they liked the taste of European foods or not, and even what feelings they inspired. These Amerindian groups had lived in the area for approximately twelve hundred years, but one hundred years after the Europeans arrived, they left in a mass migration at the end of the sixteenth century. The reasons for this are not very clear, but it would be easy to assume that the European interference in their life, the violence of the enslavement, and the constant wars against the invaders were behind their action.
AMERINDIAN FOOD
Cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz), was the main produce of the Tupinambás. Also called mandioca , manioc, aipim , and yucca, it is a small bush around 1.2 meters tall (4 feet) and has large, oblong dark green leaves; its dark brown roots are its main product. The roots have to be cooked before they are consumed, as they contain cyanide, a poison that evaporates in contact with a heat source. The amount of cyanide varies according to the type of plant.
The roots have a high amount of starch, which allowed a large number of uses in the Amerindian kitchen according to the descriptions by the first visitors to arrive in the Bay of Guanabara. It was used to make flour, which they loved eating plain or with a piece of grilled meat. The flour could also be cooked into a soup with beans or with the plant’s leaves, or made into a light porridge they called mingau . The name remains in Portuguese. The flour was prepared by peeling, grating, and washing the root; pressing away all the water; and drying the cassava mass in a ceramic plaque over the fire.
The cassava roots could also be fermented into an alcoholic beverage, Cauim , which is still prepared today by some Amerindian groups in northern Brazil in the same way the Tupinambás did it in the sixteenth century; therefore, it is possible to reconstruct the recipe. The beverage was prepared by the young women of the group, according to the contemporary testimony of Jean de Léry. They would peel and slice the cassava roots; cook them in water; and then pick small bits out, chew them, and spit them into another vessel. Cauim can also be prepared with corn, or with fruits like cashews or pineapples.
The cooked mass was chewed in order to break down the sugars in the roots, allowing the cassava mass to ferment, just as grapes were trampled in traditional wine making. The resulting brew was boiled once more and left to ferment and rest like beer.
Flour preparation produced another product, tapioca, which is the residual starch that remains in the vats after the roots are washed in order to make flour. It is a very fine, highly glutinous powder that makes a chewy pancake, also called tapioca.
There were a certain number of fruits gathered in different seasons, such as pacova , a type of native banana that has to be grilled or cooked to be consumed. Corn, too, was planted, and the corncob was grilled an eaten as an appetizer. The cooked kernels were also used to prepare fermented drinks.
Salt was acquired by letting seawater dry in ditches, but instead of seasoning ingredients before or while cooking them, they would put a small piece of the cooked food in the mouth and then a little salt, just for the taste of it.
The Tupinambás are an extinct group today; however, they left archaeological traces along the Brazilian coast, including their language, the old Tupi. More important, there were many eyewitness accounts of their culture. They had early contact with the Portuguese, and for a while very close relations with a group of Frenchmen who lived in the Bay of Guanabara; two of whom, Jean de Léry and André Thévet, wrote about their experiences with them. There are similar reports about Amerindian lives in other provinces along the coast that are similar to the Tupinambás in Rio, especially when describing food habits. For ten years, from 1555 to 1565, they exchanged merchandises with the French, mostly brazilwood, which was used to prepare a red dye, and parrots and small monkeys that were sold as pets in Europe.
The Tupinambás were a sedentary people, with a comprehensive knowledge of their land. They used their botanical knowledge to make medicines against fevers and dysentery. They painted their bodies with stains prepared with the fruit of genipapo (Genipa Americana ) and urucu (Bixa orellana ). The stains were used in their festivities. Agriculture was the women’s work; foraging obeyed a calendar as much as the harvesting of corn, manioc, or the hearts of palms. As for meat, they ate small animals, birds, and fish without opening them, prepared at the moquem, well done, until their skins were scorched.
MOQUÉM, THE LOCAL BARBECUE
One of the cooking methods of the local Amerindians was the moquém, the technique used to dehydrate and smoke meats or vegetables. Two or more wood forks supported a grill at a certain distance from the ground over fire embers, thus avoiding the possibility of burning the food and especially the skins of small animals and fish; a large plantain leaf was used to lay mussels over the grill.
Larger animals were cooked wrapped in plantain or palm leaves in order to keep their juices in; smaller ones were cooked with their entrails. They hunted and ate cavies, alligators, armadillos, turtles, and a variety of fish typical of the South Atlantic. Sardines, shrimp, and many small edible fish were grilled in large quantities to feed several groups of families more efficiently.
The best illustrations of the moquém, are ones that show anthropophagic rituals, which were a cause for great discomfort when shown back in Europe. However, once the distaste for looking at an image of arms and legs on the grill has passed, it is easy to relate to the cooking methods.
Larger pieces of meat, according to drawings from the second half of the sixteenth century, were roasted on a skewer staked in the soil close to the fire. Small animals or fish were grilled on a skewer supported by two forks, all made of wood. When cooking large amounts of food a large grid supported by four stakes would be positioned over the fire, where mussels, shrimps, and small fish covered with pacova leaves would be scattered and cooked. This cooking method allowed the food to dehydrate and therefore was also used for different kinds of meat as a conservation method. The meat, slightly drier, was mixed with cassava flour and easily transported during wartime.
They had a profound knowledge of the fruits of the Atlantic Forest. The pitanga , Brazilian cherry (Eugenia uniflora L. ), is a small red fruit typical of the coast with acid content and a strong aroma, rich in vitamin C. In the same region, there was the native jabuticaba , fruit from Brazilian grape tree (Myrciaria cauliflora ); their trunks bear very sweet black fruits the size of grapes. Close to the rivers there were Ingá (Inga vera ) with fruits whose seeds were inedible but the pulp around them was good tasting and effective against coughs. Along the coast, trees grew in the sand—cajus (Annacardium occidentale L. ), cashews. The pear-shaped fruits have tannin when not very ripe, and high amounts of vitamin C; the cashew nuts hang from the fruits. Also on the list are maracujá (Passiflora edulis Sims ), passion fruit, a climber later named for its calming qualities; and goiaba (Psidium guajava L. ), guavas, very aromatic, with their very soft pulp either white or red tinted, the size of small apples, green or light yellow skin when ripe, also rich in vitamin C.
They also collected hearts of palm—palmito-juçara (Euterpe edulis ), and baked them. The heart of the palm is the soft interior of the trunk of more than one type of palm tree; however, not all of them are edible or even soft. The more commonly used species in the Atlantic Forest is the juçara , because of its softness and taste in the softer part of the trunk. They baked the trunk in the embers, sliced it open, and ate the interior. Salt and sugar were not part of their diet; rather, they used tiny red and very hot peppers (Capsicum ) to season their food.
THE PORTUGUESE
When the Portuguese arrived to establish a village, their first intention was to expel French invaders from their land. It was more of a strategic stop on their way to their main commercial interest in India, from where they brought black pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and textiles. This first group, although arriving from the same land, and quite a few being invested as colonial authorities, were composed of a varied group—including sailors, troops, convicts, and new Christians escaping the Inquisition. A heterogeneous group with very few women, they only started to arrive in the seventeenth century.
Despite the differences in the diets of these groups while traveling in the ships, being kept in prisons, and living in barracks, the character of the food in Rio started quite soon to take shape. First of all, this was due to a complete lack of other possibilities during a very rigid colonization that closed the harbor to any other nation. Eventually an English fleet could stop for food and water, but could not disembark; therefore, there was time to develop a certain number of local dishes and food habits without an outside influence.
The Portuguese documents telling about life in early colonial Brazil only started to be known to a larger public toward the end of the eighteenth century. The everyday communications from the colony to its capital were the internal affairs of the Portuguese Crown or belonged to religious orders, so they stayed at archives until the nineteenth century, when historians started to study and evaluate them. Printed much later than French and German travel books, these books showed a very precise and accurate assessment of the living conditions. The new inhabitants began to write about their own experiences with sharp eyes, telling what was needed in order to establish a business in Rio. Sometimes a curious note would appear in the text making a picture of everyday life emerge in an especial manner.
By the 1580s, the Catholic Church, in order to prevent enslavement and to reduce local violence, began to protect and group the Amerindian population in enclosures. This intervention led the Portuguese to another solution, already in use in their holdings in North Africa. They brought slaves to Brazil.
EARLY TIMES IN THE BAY OF GUANABARA
The Portuguese took a little longer to colonize the land around Rio de Janeiro, as they were gaining immense profits with the spice trade, especially with black pepper, in the East Indies. Known as early as 1502, the bay was thought at first to be the estuary of a river during a January reconnaissance expedition, hence the name Rio de Janeiro—January River. At first, because it was not very easy to access the bay’s small entrance in bad weather the authorities chose a harbor farther south, where the Port of Santos is today. Adding to the natural difficulties, the climate and terrain to the northeast were similar to the possessions of the Portuguese in the Atlantic islands; therefore, colonization began with the same business model of sugarcane plantations and sugar mills in that region. Rio farther south could wait.
They were not alone in these American exploratory expeditions. During these first years—from 1510 to 1550, when the Portuguese colonial occupation was still growing at a slow pace, French merchants interested in establishing more trading posts in the New World built wood-collecting stations along the coast. They also took monkeys, parrots, and other exotic animals to France with them. In this way, the French contributed significantly to the idea that an earthly Paradise could be found in Brazil.
Everything about America was new, the food, the plants, the animals. There were so many contradictory opinions and stories crossing the Atlantic, including mythical tales of golden cities and Amazons on tall horses, that it took almost a century—in some cases even more—to build an accurate portrait of the New World. On one side were the expedition leaders, and Columbus was one of the very first to do this, telling their royal funders that the investment was sound and trying to gain the support of the Church.
An important voice at this time was Pero Vaz de Caminha, the scribe of the first official expedition to Brazil in 1500. After a stop of a few days in Bahia, on their way to India, he ended his first letter to the king of Portugal explaining how the investment would be worthwhile because of the extensive lands, the abundance of good water, and soil as fertile as in the Douro region, the wheat-growing region in Portugal. Moreover, he said the local inhabi-tants seemed quite docile (their anthropophagic habits were not yet known). He also remembered, rather wisely, to add they would be able to save many souls.
Another source of information was André Thévet’s book, Les singulari-tez de la France Antartique (1557), published in France after his stay in the French colony in Guanabara Bay. It greatly fascinated the public with its images of animals, trees, and anthropophagic rituals. These rituals were described with a full understanding of their mythic value, but with detailed explanations of the reasons why not all captured enemies were eaten, only those considered worthwhile.
Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World just after the recapture of Spanish territories from the Moors, an occupation that had begun eight hundred years before. For the past century, the Inquisition had been enlarging its power as more Moorish territories were Christianized. The Catholic Church had a very strong hold over the Spanish Crown, as it did in Portugal; however, certain demands of the inquisitors in Spain—especially the expropriation and the expulsion of the Jews, were attenuated in Portugal, where the Crown offered a second chance for the newly and forcefully converted. For a very high price they could emigrate to the colonies.
The encounter with local populations in Spanish and Portuguese America renewed the opportunities for the Catholic Church to expand its influence. But news of the existence of another continent was filtered through a mixture of political and commercial ideas as well as religious ones. The discovery and exploration of lands previously unknown helped to expand and secularize a concept that until then belonged only to the religious world—Paradise.
A PARADISE?
The idea that Paradise could occupy a real place on Earth took shape at the end of the Middle Ages, and it became even more plausible to a lay audience during the Renaissance when a shift in the theological rhetoric broadened the theme to secularized audiences. The broad concept was that there was a Paradise hidden here on Earth, although it was extremely difficult to reach. This idea of an almost unreachable place acted as an encouragement for those arriving in the New World, as it allowed the search for individual possibilities. Thus Spanish and Portuguese America was a place where an individual could rewrite his personal history freed from European social structures, albeit under the watchful observance of the Catholic Church.
Discussion about the existence of a Paradise on Earth was simultaneous with rising scientific research methods that accompanied the first maritime expeditions. This Paradise, located in the newly discovered continent, was more a part of the material world than of the religious one. Its meaning included the attainment of a wonderful perfect life on Earth, with instant riches.
Greed turned out to be a good companion, for a myth developed around the quest for El Dorado, quite often understood as Paradise on Earth, and soon there were many notices from America of cities completely covered in gold and precious stones. Usually located in the Amazonian and Central American jungles or at the top of very steep mountains, these cities were to be reached only through personal sacrifice. Tales of their existence arrived especially from Mexico and Peru, where the Aztecs and Incas had been exploring mines and making artifacts with gold for centuries. As it happens in most cases, those searching for El Dorado were disappointed. Riches in colonial times were for Crown and Church to acquire, and provincial governments established to explore business opportunities and to convert the natives to Christianity were soon also generating a large amount of riches.
Portuguese America did not have the same symbolic interest in the search for the El Dorado as did Spain, and the Crown did not make the same financial investments in such a search. The Portuguese colonial order was less engaged in developing a mythology and more focused on economically lucrative endeavors. Commentaries by newly arrived bureaucrats and military leaders were mostly down to earth, with descriptions of the qualities of the place and the difficulties of harboring off the coast in order to provision their fleets on their way to India. The Portuguese experience in North Africa, the Azores, and Madeira led to a detachment from the idea of a mythical Paradise. Their initial business model was already well known, with the main agricultural investment in sugarcane plantations and sugar mills, and slaves as a workforce.
Captain Pero Lopes de Souza stayed for three months in the Guanabara Bay in 1531. He noted in his diary: “The people of this river are so kind. . . . The water is excellent. . . . We had the opportunity to collect enough food to maintain four hundred men during one year.” It is very far from the idea of a countryside with lonely Amerindians and a few Europeans. Also, considering that more than one fleet would stop for supplies at the same time, the site of the future city always had a small crowd living around its bay. There were different Amerindian groups fighting in the area around the Guanabara Bay, too, and the Portuguese and the French were joining in the battles.
Nevertheless, Rio soon acquired in Europe the image of a paradise; the reasons listed in the first documents are in a certain way quite disappointing when compared to the spectacular mythic quests of the Spanish. The climate, the food, the local population, the healthiness of the place, and the apparent longevity of the locals were important themes. First travelers thought Amerindians could live as long as one hundred and twenty years, perhaps influenced by rumors from Spanish America about the existence of a fountain of youth situated vaguely in the Americas.
In Rio, it was not gold that made the city’s fame; rather, it was its geographical location, although a few charming extras did help build this idea of an earthly paradise. First, there was the undeniable impact of the Atlantic Forest in a secluded but very large bay; two large mountains, one of them the Sugar Loaf, half closing its entrance; and the grandiosity of the landscape, which even today is enthralling.
As the ships harbored in the bay, local inhabitants would at first come over and bring food; the longer the Europeans stayed, the more at ease everyone was and the better understood the local customs of the Amerindians. Arrivals at unknown places were not an uncommon situation for these first sailors; after all they had been at sea for some time. They had been to the Portuguese possessions in Africa and in India, stopping in quite a few new lands. They also had been exploring the Brazilian coast and trading with the different local native populations—exchanging animals and natural resources for clothes, tools, and trinkets since early in the sixteenth century.
THE DIFFICULTIES OF EATING IN A FOREIGN LAND
The diversity among the first European inhabitants of the Guanabara Bay helps to build an early picture of Rio de Janeiro. There are the Portuguese first impressions and those of the French, from the city of Rouen, who, despite their short stay—their colony lasted ten years from 1555 to 1565—were already there before in an unofficial way, negotiating fine woods. They were the first to establish the international acknowledgment of the land.
The first step toward understanding the local food implied adopting the ingredients of the local inhabitants. Moreover, the Europeans would have to understand the local agricultural and foraging rhythms. They had arrived in a completely different climate, and needed to learn which animals they should hunt; the different fish species, some of which were poisonous; and all the small decisions of everyday life. It was also necessary to decide how far they were going to adapt themselves to the land and transform their original habits and sometimes their profound religious beliefs in order to survive, as quite a few were not going back to Europe. Not all of the first arrivals were sailors or merchants; there were convicts evicted from Portugal.
Europeans in the Americas had to add new ingredients to their diet to avoid starvation and needed to acquire knowledge about them from their contact with the local inhabitants. Quite a few of these travelers had been in Africa and in India and had a keen eye for new agricultural possibilities, and their travels were part of the business of scouting new opportunities in the New World for their patrons. But part of the Renaissance experience was their individual attraction to a new land so different and distant from their home.
The everyday reality of the living conditions in a colony was very hard, but the richness of the ingredients offered to the new residents resulted in the development of an amazingly large number of new dishes. The main product of the first colonial cycle was sugar, which, combined with the main product of the Amerindian diet, the cassava root and its byproducts, produced an enchanting array of desserts.
The Portuguese dessert recipes prepared in Europe were soon enriched with sweet cakes and puddings made with corn flour, cassava flour, and tapioca, the starch extracted from the cassava root. The local ingredients already in the Amerindian diet when Europeans arrived were soon mixed with eggs, milk, and peanuts instead of almonds, and frequently were covered with a dense caramel sauce. These extremely unctuous sweets were the first to be made in Brazil, where wheat flour was a luxury and remained unavailable for a long time.
Eggs, on the other hand, were readily available, from not only hens and ducks brought by the colonizers but also from local birds and turtles. As the Portuguese already had a traditional sweets repertoire rich in eggs, the development of new desserts was a logical consequence. The traditional Portuguese-Brazilian sweets are an adaptation of the original recipes to local ingredients; it started late in the sixteenth century when nunneries were established in the city and the first European women arrived. The large number of cakes and sweets only got richer as the crossing of the Atlantic became more regular by the late seventeenth century, allowing the constant arrival of all kinds of nuts, raisins, and wines as the elegant dessert lists in menus and the recommendations of sweets and viennoiseries found in old notebooks, usually of European origin, attest.
The easy access to sugar in farms and monasteries transformed it from an export commodity into an important fruit preserver. There were two sorts of elegant fruit comfits; in one of them the whole fruit is cooked in sugar syrup for one or more days. In the other, pureed fruits were cooked until malleable enough to be delicately worked into the shape of roses and left to dry in the sun. Most used are the purple sweet potato, quinces, and pumpkin. There are preserves in simple sugar, green papaya, green peaches, and green figs. The several recipes vary according to the fruit and the season. Sugar means good things and abundance in the local culture, and as if a leftover memory from its start as a medicine, it is a custom to serve a little sugar mixed with water for children after a fall or for adults after receiving traumatic news.
Since colonial times the Portuguese developed a unique tradition as businessmen in Rio de Janeiro, importing goods—olive oil, dried codfish, wines—and opening restaurants and dominating the food and drink industry.
SLAVE LIFE AND FOOD IN RIO DE JANEIRO, 1580–1888
The third influence in the food preferences of the inhabitants of Rio came from the involuntary arrivals from Africa, as they were mostly from today’s Gulf of Benin, Nigeria, and Sierra Leone, and from the kingdoms of Central Africa and farther south from Angola, Guinea, and Mozambique. The great majority arrived to work in the sugarcane plantations and sugar mills and the tobacco and cotton plantations, and for a short while, they taught the Portuguese how to produce indigo pigment from a native indigo plant in Rio de Janeiro. In the second half of the eighteenth century, when huge deposits of gold and diamonds were discovered in the province of Minas Gerais, Rio was the central arrival port for an ever-increasing number of African slaves.
They arrived to work in the mines and in the city, as it was the official export center of the colony. There they worked as household employees or provided services for the population. They did all sorts of jobs, usually the ones maintained by guilds or associations in Europe—shoe makers, pharmacists, bakers, cooks. They were present in really all areas allowed by the Crown—the city did not have a printing press or large-scale factories or colleges until 1808.
They are the main body of contributors to Rio de Janeiro’s cultural ethos in food, in music, and in family relations. They introduced a rich vocabulary, always accompanied by an expressive body language that is so very recognizable as typical of Rio’s inhabitants. They speak with diminutive affectionate forms, touch each other with a closer body language, offer food all the time, and keep their groups informed. Information was and still is an important part of the social life in the different groups in Rio.
African influence in the local culture established important patterns of relationships among the city population. The Brazilian fraternal relationships have an African origin, quite a few of them resulting from the systematic destruction of kinship links by slavery—families would be separated after their arrival in Brazil. Therefore, the rebuilt family network is a maze based on affections and religious habits that endure, and in fact flourish, until today. One will choose a brother or sister who is as close as natural kinship, sometimes even more so, as it is a choice.
This fraternal relationship system was also a strong communication network that allowed a local identity, new and distant from the original, to be constructed. Still, many cultural traits of the Cariocas are seen in their habits of singing together, of informing of their whereabouts all the time, almost as a defense technique, of sharing food, of intertwining several religious creeds in a completely original culture.
Religion was and is a part of this identity in the city; the original animistic African rituals that were common to many groups had to be reorganized in the long run. Sometimes groups of the same region would arrive in the city but only after a gap of years. Intermarriage also interfered as much as geographical distances. They kept their original spiritual practices, usually hidden behind Catholic saints, as these orixás , or spirits, have very human qualities, and they like to eat. They have to be pleased, and pampered in order to help people keep peace with themselves.
The Candomblé religion in Bahia kept its close ties with Africa, as there was a constant commerce from one continent to the other. And in the 1960s there was a search for its origins. But many of the local religions were based on combinations of several groups with different regional religious experiences. In Rio, the Africans took influences from several religions, including Catholicism and Amerindian beliefs, resulting in a different ritual from that of Candomblé. But in both there is a closeness with the orixás related to food. House altars always have their images with one or two plates of food as an offering in front of them. This structuring period in African-Brazilian religions took many centuries, as the batuque , the music played with drums during the ceremonies, was forbidden by the authorities as an independent expression of their culture and religions.
As the large number of different ethnic groups continued to live together, they developed a common language, but even more, they created a new culture, as many arrived as young children. It was a common sight to see young boys of five to ten years for sale at the slave market at the Valongo Pier. According to Mary C. Karasch’s book Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro 85 percent of the newly arrived were from fifteen to twenty-four years old. As time went by, they were allowed to associate in church brotherhoods to help those in need, to build churches, and to buy their freedom and that of other slaves.
The relationship of slave owners with their slaves was very violent, even when there was not physical punishment. Listed as items of a household in inventories or as objects allowed to be sold in secondhand shops together with chairs or lamps, their lives depended on their ability to work and adapt to the new city. Despite the difficulties, they built a society in a city that developed its cultural vocabulary strongly based and identified with the richness of their contribution.
A mutual influence on both sides of the Atlantic continued during approximately two hundred years, until 1889. With the Republic, the communication between the two continents slowed down. But before that, it was very strong, as the Portuguese understood the facing continents and the Atlantic Ocean in between as one area of its influence. Relations with Spanish-speaking America were more on a political and diplomatic level with smaller cultural exchanges, especially in Rio.
Thus, a Brazilian food ingredient would be exported to Africa and then come back to Brazil as a new dish. It happened with the peppers of the Capsicum family, transformed in pepper sauces mixed with palm oil (Elaeis guineensis ), used in traditional dishes from Bahia, or the natural red food coloring anatto, also called urucum (bixa orellana ), used in fish or chicken dishes but originally a body paint of the Amerindian.
The African contribution to the food of the city has had as many stages as new waves of immigrants. Moreover, they kept arriving from Africa and from internal migrations from other states, a result of economic changes, especially from Bahia, where the sugar cane business was declining. These persons might be African or Brazilians, as the slaves born in the country were called. Therefore, it is very difficult to separate a single specific influence in the food of Rio as strictly African unless there is a witness, as happened with the painter Jean-Baptiste Debret (1768–1848), a Frenchman who lived and traveled extensively in the areas around the city from 1816 to 1831.
In his book Voyage pittoresque et historique au Brésil , published when he returned to France, he comments how the food in Rio became more colorful with the arrival from Bahia of slaves of Hausa origin and of Guinean groups. Until then, the Portuguese palate had been the stronger influence in local food, with a parsimonious use of seasonings such as coriander, peppers, and a little turmeric (Curcuma longa ). Food consisted of vegetables, broths, and cooked meats, mostly pork, but with them also arrived coconut milk—introduced in the province of Pernambuco, in northeast Brazil, by the Dutch while they had a colony in Recife from 1630 to 1654.
Because of an intense commercial interchange from Brazil and Angola, there are many similar dishes on both sides of the Atlantic. One of them is the moqueca —a fish stew with tomatoes and red peppers, seasoned with basil, onions, and palm oil. There is also pirão , usually served together with fish dishes, not only fish stews. A simple broth is prepared with the head of a fish, a carrot, an onion, some parsley sprigs, and spring onions; at the end a little manioc flour is added to form a cream, it can be thicker or thinner according to taste. Not much, but when served with the seasoned fish it ensures a well-balanced mix. There is also on both sides of the Atlantic the angu , the cooked mass of corn flour, not cornstarch, yellow, mellow, and a perfect accompaniment to stews prepared mostly with offal. The cream, also made with manioc, is called foufou in West African countries. Angu especially made a name as a street food in a city where most inhabitants were young men, either slaves, freemen, sailors, students, or clerks, who needed to have a hearty meal.
HOW TO PREPARE ANGU DE QUITANDEIRA, OR THE EARLIEST POPULAR STREET FOOD
This is one of the oldest dishes sold in the streets of the city. It is a corn flour porridge served together with a dense, slow-cooked mix of offal—heart; kidney; liver; ox tail; and pieces of beef, lamb, or pork, the result is a hearty and tasty stew. Angu is the corn flour stew and quitandeira is a word that means women who sold good food or vegetables. African women had a monopoly as quitandeiras in colonial and imperial Brazil; they would assemble in large stands with their cauldrons in a square or close by a fountain, and soon a variety of patrons would buy their food. The cooking and the movement around the food stalls became a favorite subject among foreign painters visiting the city in the early nineteenth century. Their watercolors usually depict three or four women in charge of their cauldrons surrounded by a small crowd.
Angu made with a varying assortment of offal meats is almost a lost tradition, but as the following recipe from a 1906 notebook attests, it was a welcome dish in elite and middle-class homes at the time. A rich, slow-cooked stew with plenty of subtle flavors, it may have been continuously prepared in the same pot with more water, meat, and seasonings added every day, hence its reputation as unhealthy and filthy food. It probably had—and this is an exercise in imagination—a well-caramelized taste.
Considered a poor man’s fare, in addition to the street vendors it was sold in the zungus , the first popular eateries in the city. Zungu is a Brazilian adaptation of nzangu , which means “noise” in Kimbundu, a language spoken in today’s Angola. Another interpretation for the word is “the house where angu is sold.” It was a place where slaves and freedmen gathered to drink and eat; usually they lived in the same building.
The dish, or rather its milieu, was considered a public health menace, criticized, like many other such dishes and the places where they were sold, as a source of sickness. Nevertheless, it survived, and today one can still eat it downtown were the old harbor used to be in the nineteenth century at the restaurant Angu do Gomes. It can be prepared in a lighter version with stewed tongue, but then it is not the Angu de Quitandeira!
To prepare it, cut into small pieces any portion of liver, heart, tongue, or other variety of meat and cook in salted water. The next day, make a stew with all the seasonings—lime juice, onions, tomatoes, chilies, and red peppers—and lard. After it is ready, sprinkle with parsley and add a little palm oil. In a separate pan make the Angu, either with corn flour with a little cassava flour or with rice flour. Add three or four small chili peppers.
RECIPE FOR MOQUECA DE CAMARÃO, A FESTIVE SEAFOOD DISH
This recipe has its origins in the Afro-Brazilian kitchen. Today it is part of the Carioca festive repertoire, usually one single dish of African origin with several complements such as salads. However, this recipe is from a family notebook from 1906. At that time it was served as a fish or shrimp stew, probably on the same day that they were bought. Moqueca is very easy to prepare, so each household developed its own special seasoning, and it can be prepared either with a mixed variety of fish, crabs, and other seafood or with one of them alone. It is also in the list of recipes defined as à baiana —dishes with origins in the northeastern state of Bahia or ones that use palm oil as an ingredient.
Start by washing, peeling, and deveining the shrimps, keeping the heads attached. Season them with salt, lemon juice, and a little bit of chili peppers and let them rest until right before cooking. In a large pan, arrange the shrimps in enough oil and, if desired, a little oil of palm; top with a few sliced tomatoes, onions, parsley, and chives.
Cover the pan and cook for ten to fifteen minutes in very high heat on the stovetop. Serve with angu prepared with corn flour or rice flour. The latter, also called acaçá , has all but disappeared from Rio’s tables.
A SMALL GLOSSARY OF THINGS EVERYBODY KNOWS IN RIO
à baiana : Prepared in the manner of or with ingredients typical of foods in Bahia, a state in northeast Brazil. Usually with African roots, a large majority are prepared with seafood, aromatic herbs, and onions, sometimes with okra or tomatoes. Palm oil with its characteristic taste and red peppers are also common ingredients in the recipes.
limão : The yellow fruit called lemon in English (Citrus limon ) is known as limão-Siciliano (Sicilian lemon) in Brazil, whereas, all types of limes are also called limão (lemon) in Portuguese. There are three types of limes commonly used in cakes, alcoholic drinks, and lemonades:
limão-taiti (Citrus x latifolia )—large or medium-size green limes with a thin or uneven skin, very acidic;
limão-galego (Citrus aurantifolia ), tiny, light green, with a higher sugar content, and
limão-rosa (rose lemon) also called limão-cravo (clove lemon) (Citrus x limonia ), when unripe it has a green skin; the shape is similar to a tangerine when ripe, and its pulp is always orange colored, the less acidic of the three.
moqueca : Stew, mostly used in reference to fish and seafood dishes that use palm oil in its ingredients. The word is a variation of mukeka , one of the different African languages spoken in colonial times. It is prepared in a shallow, large-mouthed ceramic pot.
oleo de dendê : Palm oil (Elaeis guineensis ) is the oil obtained by pressing its fruit. It is an East African plant introduced in Brazil in the seventeenth century. It is used in recipes from Bahia.
quitandeira : A woman who sells fruits and vegetables, sometimes cakes, hot puddings, and doughnuts. The name originates in the word quitanda , the articles sold by these women, especially sweets and delicate biscuits. They also sold their food on large wooden boards called tabuleiros around the city, and the recipe got its ancient name from them.
THE FRENCH IN BRAZIL
There has been a fascination with the French in the local culture and geography of Rio de Janeiro since they first arrived in the Bay of Guanabara, and the city inhabitants developed a long-term reciprocity. At first, they were mostly Normans from northern France, searching for Pau-Brasil (Caesalpinia echinata ), brazilwood, on the Brazilian coast. The tree was highly valuable since its wood served to make a red pigment with a tint of orange used in the textile industry.
Red pigment had several hues and different sources, all highly valued. Real red pigment, obtained at the time from the dried kermes insect, resulted in crimson red. The vivid red pigment was a highly poisonous stain that intoxicated painters and dyers as it was obtained by burning white lead until achieving the desired hue. During the Renaissance a new red ink was introduced in Europe, obtained by crushing the cochineal, an insect from Mexico. Its vivid red, seen in Aztec and Inca clothes, had enchanted the Spanish invaders, who enlarged its production and exported it.
The French had a presence in the city’s culture throughout the centuries. Curiously, their participation was at first important in a material sense—as independent brazilwood buyers and as explorers with a colony on an island in the Guanabara Bay, the France Antarctique , from 1555 to 1565. They also sent the first parrots and small monkeys to France. In 1710 and 1712, Rio suffered two corsair attacks that, with the cannonade and plundering, added much to the image of the French as intrepid.
Today they comprise the largest number of foreign students in Brazilian universities, and over the centuries the French have had a large influence in intellectual circles in Brazil. Already in the eighteenth century their ideas of freedom were brought to the country; their books were secretly read, and in response to excessive taxes, stimulated a revolt against the Portuguese Crown in 1789. The revolt started in the mining region of Minas Gerais, and as expected, the rebels were betrayed. Their trial, held in Rio for greater impact, resulted in the hanging of their leader, called Tiradentes. The other insurgents were either exiled to Angola, then a Portuguese possession, or sentenced to prison.
The main inspiration for the rebellion was the American Revolution of 1776, and the reason for the Crown’s suppression of it was an endemic fear that the idea of a democracy in the United States, the industrial revolution in England, and the liberal ideas from France would spread through the country. Among the inspirational books found with the rebels was a French translation of the American Constitution originally published in 1776. Another important book was the Enclyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des m étiers , published by Diderot and D’Alembert in 1751, and at the time it was as prohibited in France as in Brazil.
A public school system was created in Rio after the arrival of the Portuguese court in 1808, but prior to that there was a small confessional schooling system centered in the convents or in homes with private instructors and governesses, a number of them from France. A collective idea about France and in a similar way a strong desire from the French to be part of the Brazilian life thus developed. It encouraged future generations to develop scientific research together with French universities and research programs that continues to this day.
A French culinary influence started in Brazilian food in the second half of the nineteenth century. Frenchmen opened hotels with good chefs, and with a constant flow of French immigrants arriving to work in commercial companies, their restaurants and catering services soon began to open and flourish. As the capital of an independent empire south of the equator, Rio took France as a model in creating many of its new institutions. The list of dishes at social and business gatherings began to change, which influenced the development of bourgeois cuisine in the large spa towns close to the city and vacation places for rich Brazilians. Access to leisure travel abroad also became more common in the upper classes, which also brought new recipes to the city. Likewise, the French also influenced the image of Brazil in Europe. They were the first to publish a widely known pictorial representation of the country, depicting the land and the city as a place full of adventures and many riches.
THE AMERINDIANS IN FRANCE
As in many colonial cities, Rio built its image on its own cultural strengths, while always looking for foreign acclaim. In the early sixteenth century, there were many Brazilian-themed entertainments in France. They exhibited the exoticism of this New World population and became a frequent way to amuse the inhabitants of a city like Rouen, for instance, where the majority of festivities took place. What could be understood as a very exotic show was in fact a way of sharing more information about a typical commercial exchange in the Guanabara Bay, as evidenced by notices of more than one such staged setting starting from 1527. Thus it made sense for the common people and for the bourgeoisie to invite the Tupinambás to exhibit their lifestyle in France. The result was an image of an exciting place with adventurous opportunities.
Brazil, and the Tupinambá, continued to have an impact on the French imagination as their colonial world expanded. When they started to explore the eastern coast of Canada, for example, they found a plant with an edible root they called toupinambour , Jerusalem artichoke, because it reminded them of the root of cassava and of the Brazilian yam, cará (Dioscorea trifida ).
Starting in 1520 and extending through a period of approximately thirty years, Royal visits and ensuing festivities were quite “the thing” in the life of a French city. The themes staged and the decorative motives used along the way were usually of religious order as the visit’s purpose was to ensure the king’s power and renew local alliances. In 1850, Ferdinand Denis, a French historian who specialized in the history of Brazil and Portugal, found a three-hundred-year-old pamphlet with plans for a Brazilian Festival, considered the first iconographic document about Brazil in the press in the sixteenth century. It included twenty-nine wood engravings and described in detail King Henry II’s entry into the city, the high point of such festivities. The “Figure des Brésilliens,” a theatrical portrayal of the combat between two enemy tribes—with real Amerindians brought from Brazil, sailors dressed as Amerindians, monkeys, and parrots—was a small part of the celebrations, but it must indeed have been memorable.
The importation of small animals such as tiny marmoset monkeys, green parrots (the ones that learn to speak), and macaws of the Atlantic Forest brought as gifts to expedition fundraisers and aristocrats stimulated the European imagination. They were an attraction for possible businesses developments with a fixed colony, a fort, a priest, and hopefully the possession of the land nearby. Three books of great success also made Rio de Janeiro and the exotica around it quite well known in Europe. The first book to be published was Franciscan friar André Thévet’s Les singularitez de la France Antarctique , published in 1557 to great success and fame; the second, written by the Protestant theologian Jean de Léry, was Histoire d’un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil . Both men visited the French colony—France Antarctique —Antarctic France, around the same time.
The third book, Zwei Reisen nach Brasilien—1544–1555 (Two Travels to Brazil ), was written by Hans Staden, a German mercenary who lived among the same Tupinambás, only farther south. According to his text, he escaped twice from being eaten during anthropophagic rituals. He told about his life with the Amerindians to a larger public and described in detail their cannibalism.
All three authors told about life in the same ethnic group; André Thévet arose to great prestige and was assigned the position of cosmographer to the king of France after his book was published. According to Jean de Léry, he did not see much, as he never left the French fortress during his stay; however, he was responsible for introducing a new world to the European imagination. Of the two, one would tend to see in Léry’s book a more levelheaded testimony; after all, he was the one who really saw everyday habits among the Amerindians. After returning from Brazil he led an adventurous life during the religious wars in France in the sixteenth century, and his book was not published until much later in 1578.
Thévet and Hans Staden were the first foreign sources to tell about life in the tropics. It is a joy to see their pleasure in telling their adventures living in an exotic and expansive landscape for their readers. Even if from today’s point of view their impressions are somewhat embellished or imagined, they represent the impact of the new land on these writers, and its enchantment is undeniable. The books with their rich engravings and the spectacle of the Brazilian Festival introduced a very favorable image of the country in the foreign mind, which endures today.
Rio de Janeiro, more than any other city, embodies well the description of a place that triggers the creative process in many areas: art, food, film, architecture. Every century brought at least one exchange that left a strong cultural trace either in Rio or in France. Just one of many examples is the musical series by Darius Milhaud, Le boeuf sur le toît , from 1920. It was inspired in the rhythms of Brazilian popular music, which he learned when he worked in Rio as a secretary at the French Embassy, in 1916–1917. Another is the 1959 film Orfeu do Carnaval (Black Orpheus ), written and directed by Marcel Camus, with music and lyrics by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes, who would delight us later with “The Girl from Ipanema.”
There was, and there is, a mutual admiration between France and Brazil that shows itself in the city with constant art exhibits of French artists, conferences, and University exchanges. It is a two-way road, with a large number of Brazilian academics, students, and artists living and researching in France. One of the most successful traits of French culture in Brazil is in the food. It is so deeply ingrained in the local table that the Cariocas do not even notice when they cook using French methods for their sauces or desserts. It is true they are mostly an inheritance of the bourgeois cuisine of the late nineteenth century, but even so, one can buy at street markets or eat at coffeehouses madeleines , financiers , and palmiers , for example, together with their coffee with no translation needed for their names.
Food in Rio is exactly like its population—extremely modern and adherent to its popular culture, food defined by its freshness. The best praise a restaurant can receive is that they serve very good household food. Gourmets and chefs have a hard time in their efforts to captivate their public.
HANS STADEN, A NOTE
At the height of the period of discoveries in the Americas, one of the most shocking was the cannibalism rituals of many Amerindian groups. It was quite an overpowering concept that muted for a while many other important features of tropical culture and the Amerindians with their rich contribution to food and to cooking methods.
One book especially aroused curiosity about the existence of people who ate people under certain circumstances in Brazil. The adventures of Hans Staden, published in Europe in 1557, with the attractive name True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-Eating People in the New World, America . The book had a series of woodcut illustrations showing in detail what happened to captured Amerindian enemies. Later the woodcuts were replaced with sophisticated engravings in an edition by Theodor de Bry, in Frankfurt, in 1593. His storytelling enthralled the European world, achieving the status of a bestseller with seventy editions in several languages including Latin.
As it happened, at first Staden’s reports from the New World were so amazing that many doubted his identity. He was born in Germany, in the city of Homburg, in 1525, and died in Wolfhagen, in 1576. There were more doubts about his luck in escaping twice the Tupinambás. Some speculated that perhaps he had put together a few stories he heard in his travels. There were other reports of cannibalism during the sixteenth century in Brazil.
There were practical discussions about the political status of the original inhabitants of the Americas during the whole colonial period in the Americas, directly related to property concerns of the European governments. These debates included the question of servitude and enslavement of the natives as well as indignant reports concerning their extermination, whether in warfare against the invaders or from disease such as smallpox, which wiped out entire peoples. Already in the early period of the colonization of the New World by the Spanish and Portuguese alike, the Catholic Church, with priests such as the Jesuit Manoel da Nóbrega in Brazil and the Dominican friar Bartolome De Las Casas, were questioning the treatment of the local population.
The impact of the report about cannibalism and the ensuing discussion was an important part of the expansion of the major powers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it started a philosophical questioning of the political powers in Europe. Eating a captured enemy after a war was a ritual practice of the Amerindians—as Hans Staden clearly explained in his book—not an everyday feature of their diet. What he could not know was that his account of his adventures would start a long-term philosophical discussion about Amerindian life, but also about freedom and human rights. These discussions sometimes had the intent of understanding a new culture that was showing itself to the Europeans, other times they took on a literary or metaphoric sense, as when Montaigne used cannibalism to write about social inequalities in France.
PORTUGUESE AND AFRICAN, BUT COMPLETELY CARIOCA
The originality of the different dishes of the Rio table is the result of the layering of several influences. At first, regional food was created by amalgamating the available ingredients, the ones introduced by the Europeans, and imported ones. Without the ingredients of their original dishes, Europeans and African had to acquire the local food ways. Everybody that lived in Rio in its first three hundred years—that is, during its colonial period—was outside the comfort zone of his or her own culture. The Amerindians of the Termininós and Tupinambás groups had to share their traditions while at the same time accommodating the tastes and new ingredients of the first Europeans. Many of the colonists also had to learn how to cook in a Christian way, since most of them, either as representatives of a capital venture or the investors themselves, were Jews converted to Christianity in order to escape from Europe, and they were under the scrutiny and pressure of the Church’s Inquisition. Common thieves and political enemies also arrived, having been given exile sentences in order to enlarge the number of men in the new colonies. These belonged to the lower classes in Portugal—sailors, farmers, or city workers—and not all had the necessary skills to explore a new land and feed themselves. And finally, Africans were arriving from two different latitudes. They came from the ports of Cabinda and Luanda and from the northwestern African coast, from the region of the Bight of Benin, the coast of Senegal, and Cameroon. With them came even more new religious and cultural contributions, including Islam.
In order to understand how the African presence was important in the construction of the cultural life of the city of Rio de Janeiro it is important to realize that these people belonged to a number of different ethnic groups. According to historian Alberto Costa e Silva, they were not only from the Yoruba, one of the largest ethnic groups of today’s Ghana and Mali, but also Fon, from Benin and southern Ghana, and Hausa from Sudan and the Sahel regions. There were people from the Kanen-Bornu kingdom, located between Libya and Chad on a rich caravan road they controlled; Nupe from Nigeria; Fante from today’s southern Ghana; and so many others with distinct cultures and life experiences. A diverse group that included herders, cattle breeders, goldsmiths, dyers, farmers, and many others, they all brought a variety of foodways that were absorbed by the local population.
It is impossible to separate the African influence from the food and the life of the inhabitants of the city; it is also impossible to establish one single African culture. As the colonial enterprise grew, so did the number of slaves. As many as 4.9 million African men, women, and children arrived in Brazil from 1540 until 1850, according to information gathered in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, even after the prohibition of the transport of slaves across the Atlantic Ocean. Most arrived in the harbor of the city especially after the first half of the eighteenth century.
In addition to these people, who did not always speak the same language, there were large numbers of Brazilians of African origin born in the country, who spoke Portuguese, as well as internal migrants from various linguistic groups who moved to Rio for any number of reasons, such as herding cattle to be sold and then staying on. There were also migrants from economically distressed areas and those expelled for causing political upheavals, and these arrived with their own regional ingredients and eating and cooking habits.
Understanding the intertwined dependence of slaves and their owners for a formal existence in the city helps to explain why and how Africans and the Brazilian black community had such an important positive contribution to life in Rio. There were slaves who had slaves; there were slaves who had their own orchards and sold their crops at the city markets, sharing the profits with their owners; there were freedmen who bought slaves to work for them.
The Portuguese, being interested only in the commercial side of the colonial enterprise, created no local institutions except ones related to the enrichment of the Crown. They established a police department, a tax collecting system, a slave punishment system, a slave market, and Church missions. Not until the early nineteenth century did they establish or fund a college or university. In a way, this institutional abandonment allowed the cultural diversity among the population to settle into a less stratified cultural unification in Rio. The elite had business and family links with Lisbon, but they were in small number compared with all the other nationals.
Not all the plants of Brazil were completely unfamiliar to the newly arrived, but because one tends to describe what is new, it seemed as if they were landing indeed in an unknown world. New agricultural knowledge had to be learned in order to exploit it to economic advantage. Some local plants, like tobacco, would soon develop to the colony’s advantage, others to feed the new inhabitants. Cassava was one of these latter plants, a local staple of the Amerindian groups.
Beans were similar to the pulses or chickpeas used in Mediterranean cuisine, so they were planted in the same gardens and farms with the Portuguese grains and vegetables. The Africans who took part in the transatlantic slave trade also imported okra and adapted new species of yams (Discorea rotundata) to the native cará . Reciprocally, cassava and peanuts were brought back and adapted in Africa and corn spread to Portugal. The Portuguese brought their own crops, cattle, and hens. Rice arrived from Portugal quite early. Some even say that Pedro Álvares Cabral brought seeds in his first expedition to the country in 1500, as it was already consumed in Portugal, but only in 1766 did the Crown authorize the first rice milling facility.
The city became an important market for Portuguese products, from wheat flour to olive oil to cheeses to nuts, as well as scissors, knives, cutlery, kitchenware, and tableware; they all had to be imported since the Crown did not allow the country to develop any industry. Agricultural enterprises were managed with a tight fist, and certain items such as fish, cassava, beans, and fruits were considered foods for slaves. But as their consumption was not restricted, all the local population ate them and included them in their recipes, developing what would later become the favorites of their tables.
Africans arriving to work in Brazil as slaves were not always sent to work in agricultural areas. A large number remained in the city. Rio was the largest harbor in the country, which meant that a vast number of Africans found urban employment, but not necessarily in a house. Slaves were frequently employed as a way to enlarge household earnings, working on the streets of the city for their owners offering a large variety of services such as carrying water and transporting people in sedans or in hammocks. They also worked as journeymen and had to bring home a certain amount of money; the fees for their services were negotiated with their clients allowing a small gain. This money might be saved to buy their freedom or to buy a slave in order to enlarge their businesses.
With the city’s multitude of ethnic variations and an almost insurmountable communication maze of so many languages, perhaps food became a way to circumvent the differences; everybody ate cassava roots, quite a few beans, rice, meat—cattle, pork, poultry—and fish in multiple possible dishes. Food in Rio has its origin less in the national identity of the groups arriving in the city than in their religious links. At first there were the Amerindians, soon followed by New Christians and Catholics, then several African peoples with multiple religions and languages.
As the nineteenth century progressed, minorities from the Ottoman Empire, Jews, and Orthodox Christians arrived and went to live in the same areas of the city until then populated by ex-slaves in downtown Rio. This closeness somehow added to a very special intermingled table in a city where rich and poor appreciate the same food values. They took the Portuguese food and mixed it with their knowledge of tropical agriculture; used the local pepper, capsicum , in multiple sauces dried or raw; and flavored and colored the food in red with native plants like annatto (Bixa orellana ). Eventually the city population created its food vocabulary with the variety of preferences and little habits that make local foodways so recognizable in every culture.
By Marcia Zoladz in "Rio de Janeiro-A Food Biography", Rowman & Littlefield, USA, 2016, excerpts chapter II. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.