The Coxinha - A Brazilian Fairy Tale

A "Royal" Coxinha

Loyal readers might wonder if Flavors of Brazil itself has gone Crazy for Coxinha (see yesterday's post). They might wonder why this little chicken croquette, small enough to eat in a couple of bites, has already been the subject of two posts on this blog and why it appears that today's offering is another "coxinha special."

Here at Flavors of Brazil, we do admit to enjoying a coxinha from time to time, but share other non-Brazilians' wonder at the reverence with which the coxinha is regarded in Brazilian gastronomic culture. However, just as the American hamburger or France's steak/frites are subjected to overwhelming media coverage in everything from scholarly tomes to comic books, you can't ignore the coxinha if you want to pretend to any sort of complete coverage of Brazil's world of food and eating.

With that in mind, perhaps you might enjoy this possibly apocryphal fairy-tale story of how the coxinha was invented in Brazil more than one hundred years ago. We learned the tale in a recent issue of Brazilian magazine Gula, which incidentally featured a number of articles on the coxinha. The story goes something like this:

One upon a time (actually toward the end of the 19th Century) in the small city of Limeira, Brazil, lived a princess named Isabel. She was normally called simply Princess Isabel, though her real name was Princess Imperial Isabel Cristina Leopoldina Augusta Micaela Gabriela Rafaela Gonzaga. She was their heir to the Brazilian throne, and was married to a European count, Gaston d'Orléans, Count of Eu. The couple lived on an estate called Morro Azul (Blue Hill) in this small town.

The count and the princess had four sons. One of the boys was kept out of public view, as he suffered from mental illness. This young prince refused to eat anything other than chicken thighs (coxa is the Portuguese word for thigh, and coxinha means "little thigh.") , Because he was a prince, the boy's strange dietary habits were indulged and the cook of the estate prepared chicken thighs daily for him.

One fine day, the cook found that she didn't have any chicken thighs for the boy, though there was plenty of chicken meat left over from the previous day's feast. In desperation, she shredded some left-over chicken meat, wrapped it in a ball of dough and then shaped the dough into the form of a chicken thigh. She breaded the concoction and fried it, then presented it to the young prince. She told him that it was a special little thigh (coxinha) fit only for a prince. He so loved the treat that from that day forward his diet changed from real chicken thighs to his cook's coxinha. He would eat nothing else.

Soon, other family members began to demand these coxinhas, and word spread throughout Limeira about the cook's marvelous invention. The fame of the coxinha grew and grew, and eventually its fame and its recipe traveled all throughout the country. And everyone lived happily every after (while snacking on coxinhas, of course).

There's no proof of the veracity of this story, though the local Limeira historical society has found records of the story going back almost to the time the events were supposed to have happened. It's become part of the oral tradition of Limeira and the characters in the story are all historical. So perhaps we all owe the existance of the coxinha to a clever cook faced with a dilemma who invented an artificial chicken thigh to placate a hungry young prince.

Crazy for Coxinha

Veloso Bar's coxinha

Way back in 2009, in the early days of Flavors of Brazil, we wrote a post about an iconic Brazilian snack food called coxinha. As we said in that post, a coxinha is "a small, teardrop-shaped chicken croquette." and there's no doubt it's the most popular quick snack in Brazil. One can buy a coxinha at almost every one of Brazil's thousands of stand-up lunch counters, at juice bars, at buffets, and even in the country's finest and most upmarket restaurants.

Brazilians are crazy for the coxinha. It has a place in Brazilian culture analogous to the Great American Hot Dog, and shares some of the virtues of that sausage-in-a-bun. It's small but filling - it makes that pesky hole in the stomach disappear in short order. It can be eaten without a plate or silverware, even while walking down the street. It provides that salt and fat that one craves from time to time, particularly when drinking beer. The main difference between the Brazilian coxinha and the American hot dog is merely that you can buy a hot dog at the ballpark, but there are no coxinha vendors selling their wares in the stands of a Brazilian futebol field.

The love that some Brazilians have for the coxinha is reflected in a blog called Soy Loco Por Ti, Coxinha!, dealing with all things coxinha, which refers to the coxinha as "Sacred Cone." The title of the blog translates as "I'm crazy for you, coxinha" and is in Spanish rather in Portuguese in homage to Caetano Veloso's famous song "Soy Loco Por Ti, América!" The blog is the work of a group of coxinha enthusiasts and biologists from Unifesp, the Federal University of São Paulo. It's filled with coxinha lore and legend, and perhaps most interestingly, a complex and detailed evaluation of the coxinhas from a number of Brazilian bars and restaurants - all done with the goal of finding Brazil's best coxinha.

After extensive on-site research of bars and restaurants, mostly in the vicinity of São Paulo, the bloggers from Soy Loco Por Ti, Coxinha! have crowned a São Paulo bar named Veloso as coxinha-champion of the world. Here's a translation of the review of Veloso's coxinha by one of the blog's critics, Gabú:

Veloso's Sacred Cone is almost perfect. The flavor is marvelous, the spicing is just right, the crust sweet and crunchy, the dough is sinfully good - even though is made with wheat flour it is light and not at all gluey. We do have a few reservations, though. The shape isn't perfect, not the shape we all adore, and the coxinha is just a touch greasy, though this might be due to the fact that they are made to order...

Veloso's coxinhas cost R$3.50 (about USD $2.00) each, or one can buy a basket of six for R$17.50 (USD $11.00), This makes it a relatively expensive coxinha, due no doubt to the fact that it is being served in an upscale bar in Brazil's most expensive city. From the sounds of the blog's review, however, it sounds like it is still a reasonable value.