Feijoada (Brazil)

Feijoada is a dish consisting of a bean stew with meat, usually served with rice. It is a dish originating in northern Portugal, and which, today, is one of the most typical Brazilian dishes. In Portugal, kitchen with white beans in the north (Minho and Douro Litoral) or red beans in the Northeast (Tras-os-Montes), and usually also includes other vegetables (tomatoes, carrots or cabbage) with pork or cow, which can be pushed together chorizo, blood sausage or sausage.

In Brazil it is made from mixture of black beans and various types of pork and beef, and comes to the table accompanied by manioc flour, white rice, steamed cabbage and sliced orange, among other ingredients. In Portugal, this version of feijoada is known as the Brazilian feijoada and is also common to find it in the menus of Portuguese restaurants, apart from Portuguese feijoadas.

History

The most widespread popular explanation of the origin of feijoada is that the masters - from coffee, the gold mines and sugar mills - provided the slaves the "remnants" of pigs when they were carneados. Cooking these ingredients with beans and water, would have to give rise to revenue. This version, however, does not hold, whether in culinary tradition, both in lighter historical research. According to Carlos Augusto Ditadi, an expert on cultural affairs and historian of the National Rio de Janeiro Archive, writing in Gula magazine, May 1998, the alleged origin of feijoada is only contemporary legend, born of modern folklore, a romanticized view social and cultural relations of slavery in Brazil.

The food slave standard does not differ fundamentally in Brazil eighteenth century. Still based on the cassava flour or corn made with water and a few additions, ie, which had been established since the beginning. The slave society of Brazil in the eighteenth century and part of the XIX, was constantly plagued by the shortage and high cost of basic foods as a result of monoculture, the exclusive dedication to mining and slave labor, not being rare deaths from malnutrition including the death of the own masters.

The slave could not be mistreated simply because cost expensive and was the basis of economy. I should eat three times a day. Usually lunched at 8 am, ate dinner at 1 o'clock and dined around 8 or 9 o'clock at night. The historical references on the menu of the slaves, we find the unmistakable presence of polenta corn meal, or cassava flour, besides the beans seasoned with salt and fat, served very thin and the occasional appearance of a piece of beef or pork. Some orange harvested complemented the rest of the foot, which prevented scurvy. Sometimes, at the end of good coffee harvest, the foreman of the farm could even take a whole pig slaves. But that was the exception. There is no historical reference recognized about a humble and poor feijoada, made inside the most sad and starving slave quarters.

There is also a receipt of purchase by the Imperial House of April 30, 1889, in a butcher shop in the city of Petropolis, State of Rio de Janeiro, in which one sees that consumed-green meat, veal, lamb, pork, sausage, sausage blood, liver, kidneys, tongue, brains, beef innards and guts sauces. What proves that they were not only slaves who ate these ingredients, and they were by no means "remnants". On the contrary, they were considered delicacies. In 1817, Jean-Baptiste Debret now report the regulation of Tripeiro profession in the city of Rio de Janeiro, which were hawkers, and who supplied these animal parts in cattle slaughterhouses and pigs. Debret also reports that the brains went to hospitals, and liver, heart and tripe (cow, oxen and pigs) were used to make polenta, usually sold for slaves gain or blinders in the squares and streets. This practice, which appears in Rio de Janeiro, is called "mush to Bahia", mainly because it takes in its composition, palm oil (palm oil).

Therefore its creation and name has to do with ways of making Portuguese the regions of Extremadura, the Borders and Tras-os-Montes and Alto Douro, mixing beans of various kinds - less black beans (from America) - sausages, pig ears and feet. Indeed, cooked are common in Europe, as the French cassoulet, which also leads beans in its preparation. In Spain, the Madrid-based stew and Asturian stew and, in Italy, or breaded casserola casseruola are prepared with chickpea. Apparently, all these dishes had similar evolution to the feijoada, which has increased over time, and became the present-day plate. House Krab noted that his formula is still in development.


The feijoada already seems to be well known in the early nineteenth century, as evidenced by a notice published in Diario de Pernambuco, in Recife, of August 7, 1833, in which a restaurant, Hotel Theatre, newly opened, informs that Thursdays would be served "the Brazilian feijoada". On March 3, 1840, in the same newspaper, Father Carapuceiro published an article, in which he said:



In families where the real cuisine is unaware of where take-watering bofes, it is usual practice and comezinha convert the feijoada Eve dinner fragments, to what they call burial of the bones [...] They throw in a large pot or cauldron remains of turkeys, roasted piglets, bacon and ham fatacões withal good jerky vassalhos aka Ceará, everything will blend with the indispensable beans: everything is reduced to a grease!

In 1848, the same Diario de Pernambuco has announced the sale of "fat meat, suitable for whelks, 80 reis the pound." On January 6, 1849, the Jornal do Commercio of Rio de Janeiro, is a statement that the newly installed eatery "New Coffee Commércio" next to the bar of the "Coffee Fame with Milk" will in all Tuesdays and Thursdays, at the request of many customers, "Bella Feijoada Brazilleira".

Composition

Full feijoada, as we know, accompanied by white rice, orange slices, steamed cabbage and manioc flour was very renowned restaurant in Rio G. Wolf, who worked on the street General Chamber, 135, in the city center of Rio de Janeiro . The hotel, founded in the late nineteenth century, disappeared in 1905 with the widening works of street Uruguaiana. With the construction of Avenida Presidente Vargas, in the 1940s, this street disappears definitive.


In the books "Bones Chest" and "Iron Floor", Pedro Nava describes the feijoada G. Wolf, praising the one prepared by the Master Wolf. Above all, it is revealed in the presence of black beans, a Rio predilection. Contemporary revenues would have migrated from the establishment G. Wolf kitchen to other restaurants in town, as well as Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais and Bahia. Bars and taverns of the great cities of the East Central also adopted successfully. But caveat Pedro Nava that is (...) "before the venerable evolution of Latin dishes."

The feijoada, anyway, has become popular among all social classes in Brazil, always with party spirit and celebration, far from recalling shortage. Became famous in the memory, those prepared in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries, the city of Rio de Janeiro, Bahia by Tia Ciata.

And earlier, the writer Joaquim José de France Junior in 1867 text, notionally describes a picnic in the field of Old Jail serving a feijoada with "(...) loin, pork head, guts, mocotós, language Rio Grande, ham, dried meat, sausage, bacon, sausages (...) "and, in 1878, describes a" Feijoada in [Paqueta] ", where it says:" (...) The word "feijoada "whose origin is lost in the mists of time of the King our Lord, we not always mean the same thing. In common sense, feijoada is appetizing and juicy delicacy of our ancestors, the poor desk stronghold, ephemeral caprice rich banquet, essentially national dish, such as theater pen, and the thrush of felt endeixas of Gonçalves Dias. Figuratively, that word refers to the binge, that is, "a function with friends made in remote or little patent "(...)".

Currently, it spreads throughout the national territory, as the most representative recipe of Brazilian cuisine. Revised, expanded and enriched, feijoada is no longer exclusively a dish. Today, as also noted Cascudo, it is a complete meal.