I have always been a lover of food, so it came of no surprise to my friends and family, when I spoke of the wonderful culinary experiences that I was enjoying in Brazil. I have written no more on any one subject and I am sure that this page will be a meal in itself.
Breakfast
The day starts with several options of which you can have one or all.
The favourite and seemingly ever-present is bread and requeijao, which is a kind of cream cheese like dairy-lea, but more liquid. This is liberally spread over the bread and used for any time of the day.
Then there is fruit, which usually is papaya, and then coffee. However, they think nothing of serving up
any cake or chocolate desert that may have been unfinished from the previous day instead; or as well as.
Lunch
This is usually the big meal of the day, when work doesn't intercede and is where I discovered the joy of meat (All vegetarians, cover your eyes).
Meat is relatively a lot cheaper here than in England, so I indulged rather a lot in all kinds of beef and pork as well as chicken and turkey.
I had fillet mignon twice in the first couple of weeks, which is two times more than previously in my life. The second occasion was when we went to a Churrascaria soon after we arrived,
which is a gigantic barbeque restaurant. You pay one set price, help yourself to all manner of salads and pasta dishes and sauces and then sit down whilst
waiters move amongst the tables with mammoth skewers of meat. Mammoth was probably the only the meat that didn't pass before my eyes that day and later it
was be stars passing before my eyes, as I paid for my indulgence with indigestion.
The most usual way to eat out here during the day is also very different to what I'm used to.
The nearest comparison I can make is to Pizza Hut's all you can eat deal
(They have Pizza Hut here too). The difference with these everyday restaurants is that usually you pay by the weight (per 100g). You pick up your plate, and buffet-style, work your way along banks of food, of all types. It doesn't matter whether you choose ten pieces of chicken in a cup full of rose-Marie sauce or 34 olives and a slice of tomato,
you still just pay as you weigh!
(I just made that up! You see how catchy that would be in England.)
There are also many places where you can just pay one price and eat what you can. Of course, the price per kilo varies from place to place, as does the quality of the food and the depth of choice. My advice would be to stay away from anywhere that seems a lot cheaper than the others and don't be afraid to walk out if it looks too dodgy.
Dinner
This tends to be, for me, whatever I still have room for, and is often a selected combination of what wasn't eaten for breakfast or lunch: It is also occasionally followed by a modest sliver of cake,
if there's any going.
Although I generally reverted to my more English habits when in our apartment, it was this sense of topping up the stomach before bedtime that prevailed when with the family
of my wife (Dulcilene).
There is also a whole culture of foodstuffs that, although vaguely representative of English varieties, are nevertheless very much of their own identity. In the shopping centre food halls you can find many types of these snacks in abundance.
There are Pasteis (singular: Pastel), which come in two forms, of which the most common is a pastry like the one McDonald's use for their apple pies. The filling can be savoury or sweet. A common savoury filling is Palmito (Known as 'Hearts of Palm' in England), which comes from palm trees and this is usually with catupiry (one of their four most prevalent cheeses). A common sweet filling is mussarella (another one of their most common cheeses) with a slice of ultra thick Goiaba (Guava) Jam. (This filling is called Romeo and Juliet)
In fact, I soon came to realize that cheese
in one of its many forms (Usually one of four - Mussarella, Catupiry, Provolone and Parmesao) was an ever-present companion to me at mealtimes.
(Please note that the familiar names of some of these cheeses do not bear such familiarity in taste) They are not the tastiest of cheeses, nor the most varied, but they melt well and no
Brazilian fridge is complete without them.
Two words that cannot go unspoken in a sentence that describes Brazilian food are: Rice and Beans. Feijoes/feijao, which are the beans, come in many varieties, require pressure-cooking and when mixed with pieces of pork, form the base for the most traditional dish in Brazil, which is Feijoada. The rest of the dish consists of plain rice, farofa (finely grated mandioca) a type of cabbage (I think), and slices of orange.
The meal originates from the African slave community that were finally given their independence in the late 19th century and who formed the base of the Favelas that inhabit the outskirts of most cities. This national favourite, which is prevalent everywhere is far more synonymous with Brazilians, than 'Fish and Chips' is with the English.
It is important to note that the rice and beans element of the dish are what you will find available everywhere (My wife's mother eats them almost every day) and that the full meal with accompaniments is more of a 'special occasion' dish.
Desserts
Desserts are sweet. Very sweet. Sometimes you put sugar on them just so they'll not taste so sweet.
I've no idea how they do it, but they are capable of condensing a whole bowl full of pudding into a tiny little mouthful.
This inevitably leads to a constant underestimation of what will sate your palette.
The forms these desserts often take are those of sweets, nibbles, morsels and tasty tidbits, and they are made from condensed milk, sugar,
chocolate, coconut, and lots of other unknown ingredients.
They also have many, many cakes and pastries that can be bought by the slice from cake shops and cafes everywhere.
Fruit
My experiences of the fruit here were compounded
by one visit we made to a small farm owned by my mother-in-law.
(From my Diary)"I was lead towards the fruit trees and I wasn't disappointed by the selection. There were mango trees: These were out of season,
but the floor was littered with mango stones that were the remains of uncollected fruit in past months.
There were orange trees (only the oranges here have proved a disappointment so far; usually available only with a green rind and
not as sweet as I am used to and I've yet to find out the reason for this in such a hot country).
There were bananas, which I had had the pleasure of eating straight from the stalk once they were cut down and taken to Dutchy's
mother's house, and these are by far the best bananas I have ever tasted.
There were huge avocados and limes and this massive fruit called "jaca" (In Portuguese).
I tried this thing called "tamarino", which was a sweet chewy fruit that on the tree looks like a short, brown runner bean.
There were acerola trees and graviola and guava and maracuya and mandarin and caqui and pinha.
At one stage, I stumbled upon a pineapple growing right before my eyes and I realised that I had never really thought about how a
pineapple grows and I could have easily gone my whole life without ever knowing,
no matter how readily the information may have been available on the Internet.
It was in the centre of what looked like a giant cactus and it scared me to think that I couldn't drag out a memory of that sight from my subconscious,
but I was quickly distracted by turning around to find a star fruit hanging from a tree in front of me. This was a fruit that I had tried only once,
that rarely made appearances in English supermarkets and here it was growing on a tree next to me. I seldom feel truly blessed, but as strange as it may sound, that was how I felt at that moment."
Drinks
Coke and Fanta aside, the variations and wholly different options are of recurring importance.
Firstly, you cannot drink the tap water here, as is the case in many other countries I have been to and so ironically, in buying bottled water, you end up drinking a better quality of water than you would in the UK, where you can drink the tap water. This may be one reason that the sales of bottled water and purifiers have shot up in recent years in the UK. Unlike my previous experiences of lugging eight litre bottles of water back from the local supermarket whilst holidaying in Spain, here I can just phone my local water salesman, who will pop a bottle on his bicycle and deliver it to my door; replacing the empty one on my water dispenser. You see them everywhere, young boys on bicycles, which are laden down with up to five twenty-litre bottles, riding through the streets. The water is also much cheaper here, which is noticeable by its relative price to other soft drinks, with Coke etc, costing almost twice as much sometimes.
The other choices you have whilst out and about are pretty consistent and are a rough guide to the drinking habits of the Brazilians.
Guarana is a drink that hails from the Amazon, and the taste may be familiar to you from the ever-popular and personal favourite of mine, "Red Bull". The Brazilian fizzy drink entitled simply, "Guarana" is everywhere here.
It is often referred to as the national soft drink, tastes good and at a significantly lower price than Red Bull, regularly accompanies my vodka.
"Suco" is the other major alternative and comes in several forms. It pretty much means "Juice", and can be bought in powder form to make squash, in pulp form to make a more freshly squeezed tasting variety and of course, straight from the fruit itself. Personally, at this stage, I would recommend pineapple or mango. Differences in other drink types are also enough to affect your habits and routine. Milk is often UHT, which I don't particularly like, so that takes cereal out of my breakfast options, and the tea I have been given so far has not been too encouraging, although I did have some nice, sweet hot chocolate.
Alcohol is where I have to make the tough decisions. In my life I have switched from beer to spirits and back again, from white wine to red and from bitter to sweet and have never settled indefinitely upon any one type, or method of drinking. However, in recent years, red wine has been my choice for most occasions as spirits are bad for the inside of my stomach and beer is bad for the outside and I always feel less sad drinking wine on my own (My wife is not much of a drinker).
In Brazil though, I had to have a rethink, as an average quality bottle of wine costs the same as in England,
which makes it relatively twice as expensive; and yet an average bottle of vodka costs less than two pounds, so relatively,
about four pounds in England. (Please note that this is really dodgy calculating) Beer is cheaper here too, as are mixers and so wine really has to be thrown out; something I always hate to do.
You may say, "but it's not so much, what about special occasions?" But after spending so many years learning and getting used to the value of things, it's not possible to readjust so quickly, and this ignorance of value is one that affects every centavo or penny I spend. Those who know me, know I have had to save hard for a long time to maintain the way I lead my life and to save for adventures like this one, so it is an acutely bizarre sensation to spend without full awareness of cost and one that came with fear and freedom at first. (You may remember the last time you returned from holiday, looked at your bank account and said, "Did I really spend that much?").
One drink I mustn't forget, before I end this subject, is 'Caipirinha', which is made from sliced lime, crushed ice, a heap full of sugar and; most importantly, the national spirit, Cachaca. This is a spirit made from fermented sugarcane, and comes
in many varieties which can be best sampled in a cachacaria. There is also a variation called 'Caipiroska', which is with Vodka in the place of cachaca. These two remain amongst my favourite memories of Brazil, as do their strawberry and maracuja versions.
