Brazilian Soul Food

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/magazine/brazilian-soul-food.html

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I thought I knew feijoada, that terrific black hole of meats that is the national dish of Brazil: Sausages and ribs and bellies and other cuts sweating fat into inky beans. A party in a pot. When I was a teenager, I read a recipe for it, my eyes growing wider with each meaty entry in the ingredient list, and I vowed one day to make it. Years later, in culinary school, I did, charging the sweet, musky taste of black beans with the muskier taste of muscle and bone. So I know this dish. But it turns out that it’s even more familiar to me as an American than I thought.

Recently, Michelli Guimaraes Knauer led me to some revelatory feijoada in Astoria, home to many of New York’s Brazilians. Knauer was raised in Rio and came to New York 14 years ago, when she realized that growing up with a perfectionist chemist father and a mother who wrote down every detail of what she made for dinner meant that she was primed to be a great cook. We went to one of her favorite Brazilian restaurants, a spit-roasted-barbecue-and-buffet place called Villa Brazil Cafe Grill. The seats were packed with Brazilians speaking Portuguese, but I took one look at the food and thought I was in Alabama.

Sitting in the steam table was a pan of stewed okra, the pods slippery in their gel. There were collard greens. There were cornbread crumbles sautéed with bacon and onions. There was rice. And there was the feijoada, of course, a gorgeous muck that Knauer pointed to while commanding, “Really get in there, and find a good, melting part.” By that she meant the funky bits: a piece of pig skin or an ear or the snout I fished up, rendered by heat and time into lush, viscous gelatin. These quintessentially Brazilian dishes looked like American Southern food; they looked like soul food.

I called Jessica B. Harris, the esteemed author of 12 books on the food of the African diaspora, including one called, “Tasting Brazil.” “Brazil and the U.S. are like mirror images,” she said. “Our Southeast is like their Northeast, and much of the food, much of the music, much of the popular culture has come inflected from Africa.” Okra is native to Africa. Much of the rice cultivation in the New World was established by Africans. Collard greens, while native to Europe, were adapted by Africans and used like their own leafy greens.

But the bond between Brazilian and American food doesn’t stop at the plants; it extends to the plantations. “Feijoada comes out of the diet of the enslaved,” Harris continued. “It’s long and slow-cooked, the kind of thing you could put on while you were working. It’s making the best of what you’re given.” I said something about the snouts and the hocks — literally eating low on the hog. “But did you notice the mixed meats?” she asked. “The less noble parts and the sausage or the beef? I was told that the tradition of mixed meats goes back to when the enslaved brought the leftovers from the different masters’ houses to their own tables.”

It’s one thing to know that something comes from slavery in the abstract, but another to understand it as something so real, so awful, and to taste it.

But there’s another side to this history, too — or at least a continuation of it. That desperation begat deliciousness, and that deliciousness is meaningful to the people who cook this dish, who eat it, who bind their identity in it. A few days later, I met up with Knauer again, this time in her home, where she was showing me how to make her feijoada completa, “completed” with sautéed collards, rice, orange slices and farofa, a toasted manioc flour that is a legacy of the Native Americans. We’d considered making a recipe without any of the more exotic cuts for squeamish readers, because it’s already a long one and we didn’t want to scare too many people off from making it. But most of the actual cooking is simple pot-watching, and after some time with feet and tails in the pot, their piggy scent in the air, we knew we had done the right thing.

Knauer invited friends over, played some reggae and sized up how much food every person should go home with at the end of the feast. A while later, we were eating, each bite a different combination of flavors and textures: The velvety fat of skin with the sweet splash of orange. The creamy beans with the garlicky, sandy-crisp farofa. The bitter crunch of quick-wilted collards with chewy rice. It’s a spread that stays interesting for a long time.

“Brazilian food is full of stories, slaves and colonization,” Knauer said. “But now the tradition is to have a big lunch, eat feijoada, hang out all day, watch soap operas, then eat it again. You do it on the weekends, because you’ll go into a food coma. Even my friends who have been here for 20 years, they never let go of that.” We sat smiling, satisfied and soporific. What a turn, I thought, that now we rest from pleasure.

Recipes: Feijoada | Farofa | Brazilian Collard Greens