Brazilian Cuisine:
Try Brazilian Cuisine
What we know as Brazilian cuisine began as most so-called ethnic food movements do, with small restaurants in the neighborhoods where immigrants settled, diners and lunchrooms and tea rooms opened by those who wanted to offer a taste of home to their fellow émigrés. One of the latest new cuisine trends that is spreading like wildfire is Brazilian -- a delicious blending of three separate cultures that comes together in dishes and delicacies that are not found anywhere else in the world.
To understand the cuisine of Brazil, one need understand some of its history. The base of Brazilian cuisine is in its native roots: the foods that sustained the native Brazilians -- cassava, yams, fish, and meat. But it also bears the stamp of the Portuguese who came to conquer and stayed, and the African slaves that the Portuguese brought with them to work the sugar plantations. Brazilian cuisine today is a seamless conglomeration of the three influences that interweave in a unique and totally "Brazilian" style.
The staples of the Brazilian diet are root vegetables, seafood, and meats. Manioc, derived from cassava root, is the flour of the region, and is eaten in one form or another at nearly every meal. The bitter cassava root is poisonous in its raw state, but when prepared correctly, the cassava root yields farinha and tapioca, bases for many dishes of the region.
The Portuguese influence appears in the rich, sweet egg breads that are served at many meals, and in the seafood dishes that blend "fruits de mer" with coconut and other native fruits and vegetables. The national dish, bobo de camarao, is one of these, a delicious mingling of fresh shrimp in a puree of dried shrimp, coconut milk and nuts, and manioc (cassava) meal, flavored with a palm oil called dende.
It is the African influence that is most felt, however. Pineapple and coconut milk, shredded coconut, and palm hearts worked their way into everyday dishes, flavoring meat, shrimp, fish, vegetables, and bread. Brazilian food, unlike the cuisines of many of the surrounding countries, favors the sweet rather than the hot, and more than any other South American cuisine, it carries the savor and flavor of tropical island breezes rather than the heat and spiciness of the desert.
The most common ingredients in Brazilian cuisine are cassava, coconut, dende, black beans, and rice. Bacalao, which is salt cod, features in many dishes derived from the Portuguese, but flavored with typical Brazilian insouciance with coconut cream and pistachio nuts it morphs into an entirely different food. It is typical of the Brazilian attitude toward food -- an expression of a warm and open people to whom feeding and sharing food is the basis of hospitality without ever overwhelming the contributions of the other.
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