A Guide To “Comida Baiana” – The Food of Bahia & The Brazilian Northeast

Traditional Food of Bahia & The Brazilian Northeast

First of all…

Thanks Lani Brown!

This is a post about Bahian food. Bahia is the state that is most known for having the best carnaval celebration…ever….which is centered in the capital city Salvador. But it is also known for its food. Bahia is perhaps the most well known state in the northeast region of Brazil, which is known throughout Brazil and the world for its distinctive culture and palate.

The graphic below was done by Flavia Marinho, a graphic designer at Bahia’s newspaper “A Tarde.”

 

Here is a Description of Some of the Bahian Foods Mentioned Above:

Bolinho de Estudante – called “bolinhos de chuva” in the southwest part of the country (no sudeste). These are little fried dough balls, eaten as breakfast or snack food.

Caruru – is essentailly like vatapá, except without the bread.  So, it’s essentially a mixture of coconut milk, shrimp, onion, pepper, dendê, crushed nuts, and okra.

Abará – instead of eating acarajé on a delicious, fried bolinho de feijão, the healthier option is is made of the same ingredients (namely mashed beans), except it is wrapped in banana leaf and boiled.

Camarão – shrimp.

Vatapá – an accompaniment to many dishes, it’s a pasty mixture of coconut milk, shrimp, bread, ground nuts and dendê.

Salada – salad, but for acarajé, it’s usually green and red tomatoes chopped up with cilantro.

Passarinha – it’s like processed meat…but made to taste like liver (figado)…or it’s this meat thats usually cooked like carne de panela and served in cubes with sauce and it tastes like liver but i don’t think it is….

Pimenta – pepper.

Cocada – shaved coconut patty: essentially grated coconut cooked with water and sugar and made into patties and left to harden, sometimes baked.

And Here Are Some Descriptions of Other Foods From the Northeast of Brazil:
Carne de Sol – it’s salted, not quite cured meat..pork or beef, and you can fry it up easily and just add onions..it’s good but not quite healthy.

Feijão Andu – andu beans. They’re green and brown, they look sort of like This…In the northeast they eat this a lot, cooked in a pressure cooker with tomatoes, onion, garlic, sazon..it’s..alright…

Feijão Tropeiro – feijão tropeiro is fatty, doughy, bean goodness with chunks of bacon and ham and crunchy torresmo, mixed with fresh collared greens and topped with a gooey fried egg…in the northeast, they use: feijão andu, onions, peppers, tomatoes, sausage to make feijão tropeiro…it sucks. The feijão tropeiro from Minas is the best.

Cuscuz – made and eaten in the same spirit as a middle eastern cous cous, except it is typically made from corn (flakes) – milho em flocos, tapioca (polvilho azedo), salt, and water. Then they put it in a cuscuzeira or just like a round tupperware container and steam it essentially to make this glutinous loaf which is commonly eaten with butter or cheese…to make it sweet, add sugar and coconut milk or shaved coconut.

Beiju –  sort of like a crepe made from tapioca…the tapioca flour is put into a pan with lots of butter, it starts to take crepe form, then different fillings are added (chicken with catupiry, carne de sol, sometimes banana and condensed milk, coconut and cheese), once melted, the beiju is wrapped up and served like a crepe.

Arroz Vermelho –  delicious.  Arroz vermelho is red rice – sort of ilke a black rice, it’s a nutricious, grainy rice, cooked in a broth until the broth dissolves, usually cooked with onion, garlic, pepper, beef stock, soemtimes ground beef as well. Served with lime and hot sauce. Good with fried pork ribs.

Brevidade – i’m not sure if this is a northeastern thing, or maybe just an “interior” thing, but i’ve only heard of it when I was in Bahia. A delicious, simple breakfast/coffee time cake made with eggs, sugar and polvilho, mixed with cravo (clove), the cake is light, sweet and the top is almost merenguish

Temperos da Chapada –  in Minas, we’re used to beans simply made with bacon, garlic, onion, green pepper, bay leaf and some sausage — it can go as simple as bacon, garlic and bay leaf…in the northeast in general, beans are a lot heavier, and usually have meat already cooked into them – my boyfriend starts a meal by putting just beans on his plate and showering farinha or farofa on top…Beans in Bahia are cooked with the same seasonings that most things there are cooked in (for example, meat is also rubbed in these spices) – powdered saffron, powdered cumin, and urucum…which is mainly used for coloring and is salty–i’d rather use paprika…these 3 spices are added to everything, rub your meat in them to fry, put it in feijão or feijão andu….

Brazilian Woman Selling Acaraje

Thank you Lani Brown for all of your help. 🙂

 

Social Networks: Where Are Brazilians Meeting Up Online?

Social Networking: Where Are Brazilians Meeting Up Online?

An interesting graphic representation of the use of popular social networks in Brazil, thanks to Marco Vergotti…

The Culture of Plastic Surgery in Brazil

The Culture of Plastic Surgery Among Rio’s Lower Classes

 

 

A ‘Necessary Vanity’

Alexander Edmonds, an anthropologist studied the culture of plastic surgery among Rio’s lower classes and found a desire for both equity and self-esteem:

I first met Ester through her former employer, a successful plastic surgeon, for whom she’d worked as his personal cook.  Ester lived nearby to the surgeon in Vidigal, a favela flanking the brilliant white sand beach of Leblon.  One day after she’d prepared dinner for his family she shyly told him in private, “Doutor, I want to put in silicone.”

After reading up on prosthetic materials in an Internet café, she’d settled on a midcost model of breast implant (1,500 real, or about $900), size (175 cm) and shape (natural), and convinced the doctor in a minute that she was a good candidate.  Hesitant to perform the surgery on his domestic employee, he referred her to a young resident in Pitanguy’s clinic.

Ester left school at 14 to work beside her mother as a maid and now has two young kids.  While taking night classes to get her high school diploma, she dreamed of “working with numbers.”  Job prospects were grim though, and she said she’d take anything, even “working for a family” (a euphemism for domestic service).  I asked her why she wanted to have the surgery.  “I didn’t put in an implant to exhibit myself, but to feel better. It wasn’t a simple vanity, but a  … necessary vanity.  Surgery improves a woman’s auto-estima.”

Edmonds reveals what this search for self-esteem through physical alteration says about the culture of Brazil’s therapeutic landscape:

Psychoanalysis and plastic surgery, both once maverick medical specialties, overlapped closely in their historical development.  While the “talking cure” treated bodily complaints via the mind, plastic surgery healed mental suffering via the body.  Historian Sander Gilman called plastic surgery “psychoanalysis in reverse.”  In Brazil, as in Argentina, psychoanalysis enjoyed extraordinary popularity among wealthier Brazilians. But many veterans of Freudian or Lacananian therapy have supplemented or supplanted it with plástica. For the patients at public hospitals, psychoanalysis had never been “an option,” a psychologist who worked in Pitanguy’s clinic told me. Echoing the words of the mischievous Carnival designer, she explained, “The poor prefer surgery.”

Read The Rest Here, Via NYT…

News: Google Street View Takes Its Camera to the Amazon

Google Street View Heads to the Amazon, Enables Virtual River Excursions

Get ready to explore of one of the world’s most-remote regions with just a click of your mouse. No bug spray necessary.

Google is sending its street view camera around the Amazon River basin by boat and bike. It announced on its blog:

We’ll pedal the Street View trike along the narrow dirt paths of the Amazon villages and maneuver it up close to where civilization meets the rainforest. We’ll also mount it onto a boat to take photographs as the boat floats down the river. The tripod — which is the same system we use to capture imagery of business interiors — will also be used to give you a sense of what it’s like to live and work in places such as an Amazonian community center and school.

Let’s just start by saying that this is amazing. The Amazon is a place few will visit in their lifetimes. Of course Street View (or should it be renamed River View?) isn’t the same as being there. But what it may lack in quality it makes up for in quantity — the many millions of people who, right from their own homes, will be able to explore one of the most remote places on earth. That alone is cool, albeit in a way different than the experience of actually being there. (And the Amazon is just one example: Google Street View is opening up many of the coolest places on earth for people to see from home. You can easily spend hours “walking” around European capitals or huge swaths of Japan.)

The Amazon isn’t the only part of Brazil getting Google’s street-view treatment. Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Belo Horizonte are all available for exploring, lest the rest of the world think that the Amazon is the entirety of the country.

Read More, Via The Atlantic…

News: Retail Store Zara Accused of Brazilian Slave Labor

Sweatshops and Immigrant Labor in Brazil

A Bolivian migrant worker said the labour component of a pair of Zara jeans which retail at $126 (£76) was $1.14, which was divided between the seven people involved in the process.

“Spanish fashion chain’s parent denies claims but will compensate 15 migrants ‘rescued’ from Sao Paulo workplace”

Inside this Guardian story on the recent bust-up of a Zara manufacturing sweatshop in Sao Paulo is a tidbit about the growth of illegal immigration and labor in Brazil:

Retail fashion chain Zara is under investigation by Brazil’s ministry of labour after a contractor in São Paulo was found to be using employees in sweatshop conditions to make garments for the Spanish company.

“They work 16 or even 18 hours a day,” he said. “It is extremely exhausting work, from Monday to Saturday, sometimes even Sunday depending on demand. I’ve seen workers who have taken home R$150-250 (£57-94) at the end of the month [Zack: Brazil’s minimum wage is $344] – after paying off housing debt, food debt, telephone card debt, debt [to people traffickers] for the journey here.”

Many have to work for three or four months to pay off the “coyotes” who have smuggled them into the country.

“These are classic cases of immigrant sweatshops,” Bignami said, adding that he had no doubt that such labour conditions characterised modern-day slavery. Workers often face “threats, coercion, physical violence. All this to increase productivity,” he added.

Read The Whole Story Here, Via Guardian…

Elite Squad 2 Opens in the UK, Guardian Writes on the Film’s Social Investigaion

Elite Squad 2: A Social Investigation

As Elite Squad 2 opens in the UK, the Guardian has a great column on the role of the “Favela Film” in Brazil and beyond.

 

When Elite Squad (Tropa de Elite), José Padilha’s film about Rio de Janeiro’s infamous military-police unit, BOPE, was released in 2007 the director found himself under siege. Many critics found its full-frontal assault on the issue of favela violence – baldly narrated by the trigger-happy Captain Nascimento (Wagner Moura) – too much to take. Varietydubbed it “a one-note celebration of violence-for-good”, while Brazilian film critic Marcelo Janot said: “It’s really dangerous when a film suggests that the fascist BOPE methods are the only solution to ‘clean’ a city.

They’d probably take the dim view of Padilha’s decision to make a sequel, with Nascimento, the Brazilian Dirty Harry, picking up where he left off: crouched behind a car under a storm of gunfire. It’s the same American-style action dynamic at front of house, and behind it, an attempt at Hollywood business acumen – a proper franchise with its very own colonically irrigated title, Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within. And it paid off handsomely, breaking a 35-year-standing record to become Brazil’s most popular homegrown film ever, both in terms of admissions (11.3m) and box office ($63m).

In answer to the accusations against the first Elite Squad, Padilha pointed out (to Demetrios Matheou in the excellent Faber Book of New South American Cinema that there was a precedent for the critics’ kneejerk reaction: “I don’t know if people remember that when City of God was released in Brazil, it was accused of glorifying drug dealers,” he said. “What’s happened with me is exactly the same thing that happened with Fernando [Meirelles], which was the critics jumped down his throat. This is the one thing the two movies have in common. There is a film ideology that says films about social issues should give the audience critical distance, in order to evaluate what’s going on … I think the great thing Fernando did was say, ‘Let’s make a movie that has social content, but it’s gonna grab you by the balls.’ It’s gonna be emotive, and we’re going to run with it and you won’t have time to think while it goes on … You can think when the film is over.” They were both, in other words, walking the same fine line, blending urgent social comment with the slick air of commercial entertainment that is the Hollywood stock-in-trade: Meirelles’s film inherited the Goodfellas swagger, while Elite Squad was the offspring of numerous nu-metal-scored butt-kickers.

Both attracted attention in the west (City of God took Cannes 2002 by storm, Elite Squad won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 2008) because of their commerciality, but it’s impossible to overstate how important the emphasis on social commentary is. It’s a key characteristic of the noughties Latin American film-making boom and it’s exactly this kind of contentious material that would get focus-grouped out of most films under the US studio system. Over the last decade Brazil’s commercial cinema has made a virtue of systematically auditing the deprivation, violence and bribery that’s under discussion daily in the country.

Padilha isn’t franchise-building so much as sustaining a programme of social investigation (doubly so in his case: he also made the magnificent hijack documentary Bus 174. In step with its greying protagonist, The Enemy Within is more mature; a political, rather than an action, thriller. There’s no question this time of fascistic leanings: the jibes at hypocritical dope-scoring liberals have been replaced with clean admiration for the film’s one leftwing figure, Fraga (Irandhir Santos), based on Marcelo Freixo, an actual MP who headed a parliamentary commission on militias in the favelas (and consulted on the film). There are other real-life counterparts, too: Fortunato (André Mattos), the rightwing shock jock involved in a conspiracy to exploit the slum-dwellers, apparently apes the camera-hogging histrionics of Wagner Montes, a well-known TV presenter.

Read The Rest, Via Guardian…

Elite Squad 2: The Enemy Within (Tropa De Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora E Outro)

1. Production year: 2010
2. Country: Rest of the world
3. Runtime: 117 mins
4. Directors: Jose Padilha
5. Cast: Andre Ramiro, Irandhir Santos, Milhem Cortaz, Wagner Moura
6. More on this film

Protests Over Belo Monte Power Plant Construction

Sao Paulo Protests Against Belo Monte Dam

Global Voices reports that protests against Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam took place on Avenida Paulista in Sao Paulo from August 19th thru August 22nd. While construction is already underway, the protesters sought to advocate for the rights of the indigenous Xingu population.

Police say about 800 people attended, which, in my opinion, isn’t particularly impressive. I don’t mean to belittle the cause, by any means, but it will be interesting to see if this grows into any sort of movement or if it is simply isolated protest events.

The protests did occur in numerous other cities as well, though Global Voices didn’t report any numbers. Some good pictures and videos on their site, though:

Tips & Resources For Learning Portuguese Online

Best Resources For Learning Brazilian Portuguese Online

Best Portuguese To English Translation Site:

– Google Translate – Not always accurate, pretty bad for looking up slang…but of all the terrible online word-for-word translation sites, this one is the lesser evil 

Best Portuguese Slang Dictionary:

– Dicionário InFormal – This site is great for looking up slang words in Portuguese, also feel free to add your own definitions

Best Websites For Reading the News in Portuguese:

–Folia

– Globo / G1

Best Online Forum For Learning Portuguese (That is Really For Learning English…)

– English Experts – So, this website is basically made for obsessive Brazilian English-enthusiasts, and so they ask all sorts of questions like “how do you say this obscure portuguese phrase in english.” Therefore, as someone trying to learn Portuguese, you can navigate around this site learning the precise english translation for all sorts of cool portuguese expressions! Here is one example: this is a lesson on how to talk about the planets in English, it is perfect for learning Portuguese. 

Other Tips:

– Instead of reading articles on English Wikipedia, start reading up on things via Portuguese Wikipedia. It might take longer to read, but write down the words that you don’t know and learn them.

– Use YouTube to watch Brazilian music videos with subtitles (legendas or letras)

– Watch Brazilian TV! – You can find sites like Justin TV that will let you watch Globo, or just watch clips on YouTube from Programs like Fantastico, or Panico Na TV!

Portuguese Word of the Day: “Camelô”

Here’s the Portuguese word of the day! If you have any words that you would like to nominate for this word of the day series, let me know! portugueseblogger@gmail.com

“CAMELÔ”

camelô – n. street vendor

Anonymous Grafitti Artist “JR” Gives The Favelas A New Face

Anonymous Street Artist “JR” Gives A Face To Brazilian Favelas

Here is a beautiful installation by graffiti artist JR in Brazil. This group effort is part of a larger project to document the lives of women living in poverty worldwide. JR is the name of a photographer and artist whose identity is unconfirmed.

JR’s Women Are Heroes trailer