On the Road - Salvador - Pt. 7 - The SENAC Restaurant-School

In Salvador, one obligatory stop for anyone interested in Bahian gastronomy and cooking is the SENAC Restaurant-School, located in a historic colonial house on the Largo do Pelourinho, the sloped square which is the epicenter of the Bahian universe. SENAC is a national Brazilian institution which teaches vocational skills in centers throughout the country, and the Salvador Restaurant-School is part of SENAC's cooking faculty in Salvador.

The restaurant was opened in 1975, and since then has served as an introduction to classic Bahian cuisine to hundreds of thousands of tourists and as a review of the riches of the cuisine to local residents. The restaurant is open for lunch and dinner from Tuesday to Saturday, and is invariably very busy, although it's almost always possible to get a table fairly quickly. (One thing to note - there are, in fact, two SENAC buffets housed in the same mansions. On the street level is a small buffet that serves standard Brazilian dishes, those that can be found in almost any pay-by-weight restaurant in Brazil. The Bahian buffet is up two flights of stairs on the top floor of the house.)

As the restaurant fuctions as a teaching facility as well as a restaurant, the cooks, bartenders and wait staff are all students at SENAC working under the supervision of the faculty's teachers and professors. Because of its non-profit status, the school's charge for the unlimited-serving buffet is a reasonable R$40 (about USD $20). There are cheaper Bahian restaurants in town (and there are definitely more expensive, too), but at no other will you be able to sample such a wide variety of Bahian dishes in a single location. Every day there are at least forty dishes available on the buffet, including an amazing selection of traditional desserts, something that Bahian cooks have been noted for for centuries. The number of dishes one can sample is limited only by one's appetite and capacity. You'll find abará and acarajé, of course, but also almost a dozen types of moquecas - everything from traditional standards like fish and shrimp up to moqueca de fato (fato meaning entrails). There are numerous rice and bean dishes, steamed fish and vegetables, sweet potatoes, various treatments of manioc and three or four traditional Bahian pimentas (hot sauce). A word to the wise when it comes to SENAC's pimenta; the restaurant makes no concessions to non-Bahians' limited tolerance for hot peppers. SENAC's hot sauces are very hot indeed, so be careful.

The service staff is hardworking and earnest, though it must be said that as it is composed of students, the service isn't always what one might call polished or speedy. But what the waitresses and waiters may lack in velocity they make up for in charm and friendliness.

The food at SENAC is good, at times very good. It may never be the best Bahian food on the planet, but it is the spot for newcomers to Bahian food to discover which dishes they love, which ones they like and which they'd prefer not to return to. A visit to SENAC should be made early in one's trip to Salvador. Later, in other restaurants, armed with what you learned at SENAC, you can knowledgeably read a Bahian menu and revisit those dishes that particularly appealed to you.

On the Road - Salvador - Pt. 4 - Dona Mariquita's Endangered Dishes

Walk down the long narrow one-way street called Rua do Meio in Salvador's happening Rio Vermelho neighborhood, away from the leafy Largo da Mariquita square which is home to Dona Cira's best-in-the-city acarajé stand, and you'll eventually come across a small unprepossessing restaurant named Dona Mariquita. It's on the right as you leave the square and is adorned only with a simple sign with its name. It's easy to miss, or at least it was for our taxi driver on the windy and rainy night we visited Dona Mariquita recently. He had to circle around and try a second time, but armed with the address and a trusty GPS we were able to find it second time around.

Even on a damp, raw evening - a rarity in tropical Salvador - the interior of the restaurant radiated warmth, human warmth. We were greeted with a smile by the entire waitstaff (it was still early, at least by Salvador standards), given our choice of seats and were helped to settle in, candles were lit. and menus were distributed. All of which made the effort we'd made to locate Dona Mariquita on such a stormy night worthwhile. The large room felt indeed like shelter from the storm.

Dona Mariquita had been on our to-do list for Flavors of Brazil's gastronomic tour of Salvador, Bahia ever since we'd begun planning the trip a couple of months ago. It's not the most famous restaurant in the city, nor the most chic. Neither does it perpetually top social network review sites. But with limited time, we'd chosen Dona Mariquita for one of our dinners - our "traditional Bahian cuisine" dinner - for one reason. Just as Diane Fossey provided sanctuary and shelter in Africa for her beloved gorillas, or as ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax recorded folktunes and spirituals as sung by black field hands in the Southern USA before they were lost forever, Dona Mariquita has as its purpose the preservation of "endangered dishes" of traditional Bahian cuisine. We wanted to see and taste the work of this interesting gastronomic project.

Dishes and recipes, as with any other cultural object, don't always have an unlimited lifespan. Whether it's Bahian food we're talking about, or Russian, or Chinese, dishes disappear from kitchens, tables and menus of even the most traditional gastronomic cultures to be replaces by new ones. In medieval Europe, swan was a traditional banquet centerpiece, though it's almost never eaten today. Italian pasta sauces from the same period, before explorers brought tomatoes back from the New World, have been changed radically by the arrival of that fruit. Bahian food is no exception to this rule, and some dishes that were common in earlier times are just not to be found in 21st-century Salvador, or anywhere else in Bahia - except at Dona Mariquita, that is.

The restaurant's "mission statement" which is published in Portuguese on its website says:

Opened on November 23, 2006, Dona Mariquita has as its purpose the preservation of traditional regional dishes of Bahia; dishes once served at fairs and festivals, street food, what you might call "roots food."...
Returning from a voyage to our gastronomic origins, Dona Mariquita has rescued original recipes and ingredients, bringing seafood from the Recôncavo da Bahia (the region surrounding Salvador), as well as seeds and leaves, blending together indigenous, African and countryside influences in search of the true flavor of our history. (translation by Flavors of Brazil)

Arroz de Hauçá

On the website, there is a very interesting article about the restaurant's efforts to preserve Muslim elements in Bahian culture, an influence that generally goes unnoticed in most discussions of the food of Bahia. Many of the black Africans who were forceably brought from West Africa to Brazil to slave on the colony's sugar plantations and in its mines were Muslims. Over time and under pressure from Catholic owners and authorities, most of these slaves became Christians in Brazil, and their Muslim heritage was lost or hidden. The restaurant features some dishes that can be traced back to Muslim West Africa, dishes like Arroz de Hauçá, variations of which are still common in Africa.

Dishes which are under the restaurant's protection are identified as such on the restuarant's extensive menu, which also features many of the non-endangered jewels of Bahian gastronomy such as Xinxim de Galinha and Moqueca de Peixe. We were unable to sample them all, due to limited time and stomach capacity, but did make sure that our menu choices focused on those dishes that, but for Dona Mariquita's efforts, might have disappeared entirely from Bahia's gastronomic history. Our next post  in this series will focus on these dishes. 

In the meantime, we applaud Dona Mariquita's noble effort and encourage readers of the blog who might be in the neighborhood in the future to do themselves the favor of enjoying the restaurant's unusual dishes while surrporting the preservation of Bahian food history at the same time.

On the Road - Salvador - Pt. 2 - The Joy of Abará

As Julie Andrews once warbled, "Let's start at the very beginning, A very good place to start...". So, we're beginning our reportage on our recent visit to Salvador, Bahia with the item that's always first (alphabetically, at least) in any list of traditional Bahian dishes - abará. It's hard to think of anything that might proceed abará in an alphabetical listing of dishes - except aardvark, and they don't eat aardvarks in Bahia.

 Abará  is one of the foods that is most closely associated with the Afro-Brazilian religion of Bahia, Candomblé, and it's also one of the items that can always be found for sale by baianas, the traditionally-dressed black women who sell Bahian food, most notably acarajé, on streets, squares and beachfronts of Salvador.

Iansã

In the rituals of Candomblé, which preserve the religious traditions brought from Africa to Brazil by slaves, abará is a favorite food of the orixá (divinity) Iansã, and offerings of food made to her invariably include abará. Iansã is the orixá of the River Niger in Africa, and of the wind, hurricanes and tempests. She is considered to be one of the most agressive of the female orixás and has dominion over the dead. In the syncretic tradition of linking orixás with saints of the Catholic church, she is identified with Santa Barbara and is worshiped as such in the Catholic churches of Bahia.

 There's nothing complex or complicated about abará - it's not a fancy or delicate food. But it does combine many of the most important ingredients of the Bahian pantry, which was large inherited from Africa. Basically, an abará is a soft batter made from black-eyed pears, flavored with bright orange dendê palm oil and cooked by being steams in a banana-leaf package. Sometimes ground dried shrimps are added to the batter for additional flavoring, but this isn't obligatory. Readers familiar with Mexican tamales will have a very good idea of what an abará is, as the two dishes are very similar. They differ in the mass used to create the dough - ground corn in the case of tamales and ground black-eyed peas in the case of abará. Although tamales are often stuff with a meat or chicken filling, abarás are not and resemble most closely those unstuffed tamales called "blind."

The list of ingredients that go into making abará is almost identical to acarajé. Both are based on the same batter, though in acarajé the batter is deep-fried in dendê whereas abará is steamed rather than fried and a small amount of dendê is stirred into the batter to flavor it. This makes abará slightly more healthy eating than acarajé, though it could never be considered health food.

In Salvador we sampled  abará at the famed Bahian buffet of SENAC, the public-private vocational school that can be found in any city in Brazil. In our next post, we'll look at the 40+ dish SENAC buffet in more detail. It's an edible encyclopedia of Bahian cuisine and an essential part of the Salvador experience.

(Click here for a recipe for abará  from an earlier posting on Flavors of Brazil).

RECIPE - Amaranth in Coconut Milk (Bredo do Coco)

Are you a fan of creamed spinach? We here at Flavors of Brazil are, bigtime, even though we know that creaming the spinach reduces its nutritional value significantly and piles on the calories. But it's sooo delicious.

This Brazilian recipe for the green known as bredo or caruru in Portuguese and green amaranth in English is in the creamed spinach family of recipes - greens cooked for a longish time in a creamy, fatty liquid. It's just as delicious as its steakhouse sidedish from the USA.

It's well-loved in northeastern Brazil, wherever African culinary traditions predominate, and in the state of Pernambuco, it's intimately associated with the Good Friday meal. Pernabucanans don't consider the Good Friday buffet table complete without a big bowl of amaranth in coconut milk, or bredo do coco as they call it.

Unless you live in the tropics, you'll not likely find a good source of green amaranth leaves. However, this dish is wonderful, maybe just as wonderful, made with spinach or any other substantial green, like collard greens, beet greens or mustard greens. The substitution of coconut milk for the cream used in creamed spinach also means that the dish can be served to vegans.
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RECIPE - Amaranth in Coconut Milk (Bredo do Coco)
Serves 6

2 large bunches amaranth (or other substantial green)
1 cup (250 ml) coconut milk
4 tomatoes, peeled, seeded and chopped
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
2 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
handful chopped cilantro
salt and pepper to taste
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Wash the green thorough, then remove thick stems if present. Put into a large bowl, then pour boiling water over to scald and remove sap. Drain and rinse. Reserve.

In a large deep frying pan heat the olive oil, then saute the onion and garlic. Cook until the onion is soft and transparent but not browned. Add the tomatoes, cook at medium temperature until the tomato breaks up and a sauce forms. Add the cilantro, and season to taste with salt and pepper.

Add the reserved greens and cook, stirring frequently for about ten minutes, or until the greens are very soft. Add the coconut milk, raise heat and bring just to a boil.

Remove from heat, pour into decorative serving bowl and serve immediately.

VEGETABLES OF BRAZIL - Green Amaranth (Caruru or Bredo)

This plant, which yields delicious green leaves that are often compared to spinach and often prepared in similar ways to spinach, is in the gastronomic sense very peripatetic - its history as a comestible has taken it back and forth across the oceans several times, obscuring its origins and engendering a confusing babel of names.

The scientific name of the plant is Amaranthus viridis, which tells us that it's a member of the large botanical family known as the amaranths. The amaranths are thought to have originated in the highlands of tropical North America, where they were a food source for Amerindians native to that region, such as the Maya. After Cortes' conquest of Mexico, Spaniards returning from the New World to the Old carried with them, among their treasures, newly discovered foods native to the Western Hemisphere. Chocolate, chili peppers, tomatoes and the domestic turkey were among Mexico's gifts to the kitchens of Spain, but so were plants like amaranth. Spanish and Portuguese explorers, colonists and slavers then carried amaranth on to Africa where it flourished and became part of the native diet.

When African slaves were forcefully brought to Brazil to work on sugar plantations and in gold mines, they brought their food traditions and their foods with them. Thus, amaranth recrossed the Atlantic ocean back to Brazil, where it became an integral part of the slaves' diet in colonial times. The route by which amaranth became part of Brazil's gastronomy, therefore, is a long one - Mexico to the Iberian Peninsula, to West Africa and finally back across the ocean to Brazil.

Because amaranth came to Brazil from Africa, not directly from Mexico, it is most strongly associated with the Afro-Brazilian cuisines of Northeastern Brazil, specifically in the state of Bahia where the African influence on cooking is strongest. In Bahia and neighboring states, the plant is normally called bredo in Portuguese. In other regions of Brazil it's better known as caruru. Confusingly, in the region where the term bredo prevails, there is a stew-type dish called caruru, made primarily with okra (quiabo) another vegetable import from Africa.

The plant's journey from Mexico to Brazil is not the only one it's made. From its Mexican origins, it has spread to India, particularly in South India, to Greece, and to the Caribbean, where the Jamaicans know it as callaloo. It has even become part of the Indian tradition of medicine known as Ayurvedic, where it is used as a medicinal herb.

Urbanized caruru/bredo

Even though the plant has significant food value, it has adapted itself so well to soil and climate conditions in Brazil that many farmers consider it invasive - a weed. It has even successfully urbanized itself and knowing foragers often spot it growing in abandoned inner city lots or even in cracks in the pavement. The smartest of these foragers have discovered this bounty and are helping themselves to a free supply of the green.

On The Road - Belém (Pt. 1) - The Culinary Importance of Belém

From time to time Flavors of Brazil posts a series of related articles which we call "On The Road". Each series details the gastronomic culture - the culinary history, distinctive ingredients and dishes, and local recipes - of a Brazilian city or region. Each series is based on a visit we've taken to the locale featured, often a city we haven't visited before. In the past, these series have highlighted destinations such as São Luís, Maranhão, Rio de Janeiro and Jericoacoara, Ceará.

Flavors of Brazil has recently returned from a fisrt-time visit to the city of Belém, capital of the Brazilian state of Pará and situated near one of the many mouths of the gigantic Amazon River system, just one degree south of the Equator. It was an eye-opening experience and a crash course in the food of Brazil's north, a culinary culture that is very different from the rest of Brazil. The next few posts on Flavors of Brazil will concentrate on what we saw, heard, smelled and tasted while we were there.

Those readers of this blog who've been with the blog for a while (and who are attentive students of Brazilian gastronomy!) will remember that the tremendously varied and inventive regional cuisines that make up Brazilian food culture are the result on the mixing and meshing of three primary gastronomic influences. These three influences are the tripod from which Brazilian cuisine rises and the various regional cuisines of this country grew from the many possible ways in which these influences can blend and combine. The three major influences are European, primarily Portuguese, food culture, African food culture and Amerindian food culture. European food culture came to Brazil with the various waves of European explorers, colonizers and immigrants. African food culture crossed the Atlantic in the belly of slave ships along with the approximately 10 million Africans forced in slavery in Brazil's sugar plantations and gold mines. And the Amerindian food culture arrived on foot with the very first humans to inhabit Brazil, thousands of years before either Europeans or Africans were aware that the Americas even existed.

Touches of these three primary influences, European, African and Amerindian, are found in most Brazilian regional cuisines, but only in one cuisine is one of these influences of almost exclusive importance. The spicy, rich cuisine of the state of Bahia owes its unique qualities almost entirely to the culinary heritage of Africa. South-central Brazil, the states of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais, is where you'll find cooking that is most strongly influenced by the cuisines of Europe. And the north, the location of the world's largest rain forest and the world's largest river, is where Amerindian food ways most stongly inform the local cuisine. The gastronomic center of Brazil's north is Belém. One can't really know Brazilian cuisine without knowing the food of Belém, just as it's impossible to claim to know Brazilian cuisine without having sampled the African-influenced dishes and delicacies of Salvador, Bahia. The food of Belém and its region is fundamental to Brazilian gastronomy, and so in the next week or so, Flavors of Brazil hopes to open a small window on this fascinating, exotic and largely-unknown cuisine. We hope that reading about the city, its markets, shops, food-stalls and restaurants will give you just a bit of the Flavor of Belém, an important part of the Flavors of Brazil.

RECIPE - Bahian Farofa with Dendê (Farofa de Dendê)

All Brazilian farofas combine manioc flour (farinha) with some sort of fat or oil to moisten and flavor the dry, lightly-flavored flour. The fat can be melted butter or lard, it can be rendered bacon fat, or it can be a liquid oil like olive oil or neutral vegetable oil.

In the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, where the local style of cooking evidences a strong African influence - a heritage of the history of slavery in Brazil - the oil typically used in making farofa is the shockingly-orange, highly-flavored palm oil called dendê, which came from West Africa with the very first slaves bound for Brazil's gold mines and sugar plantations.

This recipe from Bahia also adds another typically West African flavor to the manioc and dendê mixture - dried shrimps. With a strong flavor of the sea, the small, dried crustaceans are finely chopped or ground into a flour to add one more of Bahia's essential flavors to this dish.

Bahian dendê farofa, along with white rice, is the perfect accompaniment for any of Bahia's marvelous moquecas - fish or seafood stews, redolent of coconut milk, cilantro and dendê.

There is no adequate substitute for any of the main ingredients in this dish, though manioc flour (farinha), dendê and dried shrimps can often be found in Latin American and African markets in cities which have immigrant communities, and dried shrimps can also be found in most Asian markets.
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RECIPE - Bahian Farofa with Dendê (Farofa de Dendê)
Serves 6

1/2 cup (125 ml) dendê oil
1 medium onion, finely chopped
4 oz. (100 gr) dried shrimp
2 1/2 cups dried manioc flour (farinha)
salt to taste
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Finely mince the dried shrimp with a large knife or cleaver, or, alternatively, grind them in a spice grinder.

Heat the dendê in a large frying pan, the add the chopped onion and cook until the onions are soft and golden. Add the minced or ground shrimp and stir well to combine. Add the manioc flour in a steady stream, stirring all the while to moisten all the flour. When the farofa is dry and the grains are separated, season with salt, then continue to toast the farofa for a minute or two, stirring constantly.

Serve immediately as part of a Bahian-style meal.

Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brasileira by Abril Editora.

RECIPE - Skate Moqueca (Moqueca de Arraia)

One of the most popular ways to serve arraia (ray or skate in English) in Brazil comes from the northeastern state of Bahia, specifically from the Afro-Brazilian culinary traditions of Salvador, the state's capital city and Brazil's original capital.

In traditional Bahian cuisine, a thick stew made from fish or seafood in a broth of tomatoes, onions, coconut milk and the brilliant-orange palm oil known as dendê is called a moqueca. The word moqueca and the recipe both come from Africa and the tradition of cooking fish in moquecas crossed the Atlantic to Brazil in the hold of slave ships which carried Africans to slavery in the mines and sugar cane plantations of Brazil.

This recipe for moqueca de arraia (moqueca of skate or ray) comes from the SENAC cooking school in Salvador, and is a typical moqueca. There are as many recipes for moqueca as there are cooks, but the ingredients used in this recipe are found in some combination in almost every recipe.

Dendê palm oil has a distinctive color and flavor and there really is no substitute for it, although substituting 2 or 3 tablespoons of sweet paprika will give the final dish almost the same color. However one of the most important flavor components will be missing when dendê is absent. In cities that have a Brazilian immigrant community, markets that cater to Brazilians will likely have dendê in stock, and in cities with an African immigrant population you can often find dendê in African markets, labeled simply palm oil.
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RECIPE - Skate Moqueca (Moqueca de Arraia)
Serves 4

2 lbs (1 kg) skate wings
1 clove garlic, finely chopped
juice of one lime
1 medium onion, sliced
2 medium tomatoes, peeled, seeded and sliced
2/3 cup coconut milk
1/3 cup dendê oil
1/4 cup cilantro, finely chopped
salt and pepper to taste
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Cut the skate wings into large pieces. Bring lots of water to a boil in a large saucepan, then add the skate. Lower the heat to a simmer and cook the fish for about 15 minutes. Drain the fish, and let cool completely. When the fish is cool, using your fingers or a fork, pull the meat away from the cartilaginous bony structure and flake it. Discard the cartilage. Season the meat with the lime juice, chopped garlic and cilantro and season with salt. Let marinade no more than 1/2 hour.

Preheat the oven to 350F (180C)

In a ceramic or glass casserole, preferably round, layer the slices of tomato and onion, alternating with layers of the reserved fish. Pour the coconut milk and dendê oil over all. Place in the preheated oven, and cook for 20-25 minutes, or until the tomato and onion are soft and the broth is bubbling hot.

Serve immediately accompanied by plain white rice and some sort of hot chili-pepper sauce.

Minas Gerais - Gastronomic Routes

Even though Italian cooking includes such well-known regional styles of cooking as Neapolitan, Sicilian, Venetian, even Sardinian, most gastronomic historians consider the region of Emilia-Romagna to be the true heartland of traditional Italian gastronomy. Containing such gastronomic hot spots as Parma (with its ham and its cheese), Modena (home of balsamic vinegar) and Italy's food capital, Bologna, Emilia-Romagna is at the same time the cradle of traditional cooking and the location of some of the most daring and avant-garde 21st century Italian gastronomy.

In Brazil, which resembles Italy in the number and variation of its regional cuisines, the interior state of Minas Gerais, located in the south-eastern part of Brazil, holds an analogous position in Brazilian gastronomy to that of Emilia-Romagna in Italian. Not as unique as Bahian cooking with its bold mixture of African and European styles and techniques, nor as strictly-European as the cuisines of the south of Brazil, mineiro (meaning from Minas Gerais) gastronomy is to many people the true essence of Brazilian cooking.

The influences that went into the creation of mineiro cooking are those which define all Brazilian cuisine - European, particularly Portuguese, African and native Indian. In the lush highlands of mountainous Minas Gerais these influences were blended, mashed and mixed into something uniquely new and Brazilian - Minas Gerais was the crucible in which Brazilian cooking was forged.

Even today, Minas Gerais is one of the places in Brazil where food and cooking matters most. From the modern capital Belo Horizonte, through exquisitely beautiful baroque cities like Ouro Preto, Tiradentes and Diamantina, and on to the small villages and farms that dot the landscape, people care about what they eat and they honor the foods that have been a part of their diet for years, even centuries. Local cheeses, long-cooked stews, sweets and desserts whose recipes date back to the convents of medieval Portugal - they all play a part in mineiro gastronomy.

Because so much of what makes mineiro cooking such a marvel comes from small towns and villages throughout the state, we at Flavors of Brazil were thrilled to recently come across a website called Sabores de Minas (Flavors of Minas Gerais) and its 69 different gastronomic routes through the state. Each route concentrates on a particular region or a particular speciality of this enormous state (slightly larger than France). For example, route number 32 concentrates of the baroque cities of the 17th Century mineiro gold rush, number 22 is focused on the relatively-unpopulated north of the state, and number 44 on coffee and sweets. For each route, the website publishes a map and a list of 15-18 suggested stops. A stop might be a farm that produces cheese, it might be a long-established local restaurant, or it might even be the home of a cook whose fame has spread beyond her family to include her whole village. Each stop is described in detail, with personal stories of the cooks and producers involved and each includes a recipe.

The site is a treasure-trove for anyone interested in traditional Brazilian gastronomy, and a powerful inducement to book a flight to Belo Horizonte, grab a rental car and head for the hills in search of the soul of mineiro cooking. And the 700+ recipes are enough to keep any amateur cook happy for months in the kitchen at home.

For most non-Brazilians there is one significant problem with the website - it's in Portuguese only. Although Google will offer to translate the page in most browsers, its translator is not yet sufficiently sophisticated to correctly translate this site. Because of that language difficulty, and because of the importance of mineiro cooking to Brazilian gastronomy, tomorrow  Flavors of Brazil will publish the first of s series of occasional reviews/translations of some of the best of Sabores de Minas. We hope it will open some eyes to the beauty of the state and the quality of its food products and cooking.

RECIPE - Coconut Blancmange for Yemanjá (Manjar Branco para Yemanjá)

Yemanjá painted by Carybé

In yesterday's post here on Flavors of Brazil, we promised to post a recipe today for one of the ceremonial dishes associated with the goddess Yemanjá in the Afro-Brazilian religious tradition of Candomblé. Each of the many gods and goddesses of Candomblé has specific foods with which they are associated - foods that they are said to enjoy - and these foods are offered to the deity during Candomblé ceremonies (and subsequently eaten by devotees during the post-ceremonial feast).

Because Yemanjá is the goddess of the sea, the essence of motherhood and protector of children, and because she is identified with the Virgin Mary, her colors are blue and white. The foods that are offered to her are consequently white or light in color.

Manjar branco

This recipe, which comes from a Brazilian webpage called Comida do Orixá Iemanja (Food of the Goddess Yemanjá) is for one of the dishes most commonly associated with Yemanjá. Simple, light, sweet and most importantly, white, the milk pudding known as blancmange in English and manjar branco in Portuguese is perfectly suited to this loving, motherly, beautiful and vain goddess.

It's also perfectly suited to non-ceremonial roles, such as a simple dessert to end a rich meal. It can be topped with almost any fruit compote or coulis if you wish a more complex dish, but when it's served to Yemanjá it's presented in its simplest and purest form.
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RECIPE - Coconut Blancmange for Yemanjá (Manjar Branco para Yemanjá)

4 cups (1 liter) hot whole milk - just at the boiling point
1 cup grated unsweetened coconut
4 Tbsp cornstarch
a small amount cold whole milk
1 cup (250 ml) granulated white sugar
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In a medium saucepan, pour the hot milk over the grated coconut. Let soak for 5 minutes. Meanwhile, dissolve the cornstarch in a small quantity of cold milk. Stir the cornstarch mixture into the liquid in the saucepan, then add the white sugar.


Heat the saucepan over medium-high heat, stirring constantly until the sugar is complete dissolved. Continue to cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture is very hot and has thickened, usually about 3 to 5 minutes. Do not let come to a full boil.


When the mixture has thickened, remove from the heat, pour into a ceramic bowl or a decorative mold and let cool completely. When cool, refrigerate for at least 4 hours before serving.

February Second - The Festival of Yemanjá

Yemanjá

Every year on February Second, some million or more people in the Brazilian city of Salvador, Bahia, walk in procession through the streets of the Rio Vermelho district of that city, all dressed in white, making their way down to the seashore and the small house that's said to be the home of Yemanjá, a powerful goddess (Orixá) in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. Yemanjá is the essence of motherhood, the protector of children, fishermen and sailors, and most importantly, she is the sea itself. When the celebrants reach the shore Yemanjá's they pass their baskets laden with gifts for the goddess to fishermen to take out to sea and leave them on the waters as offerings to the Orixá. Gifts for Yemanjá often include images of the goddess, flowers and objects of female vanity (perfume, jewelry, combs, lipsticks, mirrors). Later in the day, the festival of Yemanjá becomes a massive street party which carries on into the night.

In the synchristic tradition that blends the Orixás who traveled to Brazil with African slaves with the saints and holy figures of Christianity who arrived with the Portuguese,  Yemanjá is identified with certain aspects of the Virgin Mary, and February Second in the Roman Catholic calendar is the day of Our Lady of Navigators (Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes). The celebrants at Salvador's festival honor one divinity in two personages, the African Yemanjá and the Christian Our Lady, without thoughts of separation or difference between the two.

Gifts for Yemanjá

As with all the gods and goddess of the Candomblé tradition, Yemanjá is associated with certain foods, and these foods are offered to her on her special day as well as eaten by her devotees at the street festival that follows the ceremonical activities of the day. Yemanjá's colors, like the Virgin Mary's, are white and blue - obvious choices for a Rainha do Mar (Queen of the Sea). An Orixá's favorite foods are often visually connected with his or her image and chosen colors, Yemanjá's special food are white, or very light in color (there are very few foods that are truly blue). Yemanjá prefers sweet foods, making such dishes as honeyed rice and sweet corn puddings essential parts of her festival. She is said to be particularly fond of a sweet coconut-flavored milk jelly called manjar branco (the word is a cognate of the French-English word blancmange). She also enjoys puffed rice, and this snack is everywhere at her festival.

The following YouTube video was filmed in Salvador on February 02, 2011 during the festival of Yemanjá. The soundtrack is Brazilian singer Baden Powell singing his composition Canto de Yemanjá.


Tomorrow, Flavors of Brazil will publish a recipe for Yemanjá's manjar branco.

Cira - The Best Acarajé

Cira's acarajé

Every year, the Brazilian newsmagazine Veja (think Time or Newsweek) publishes a gastronomic guide for each of the major cities of Brazil called Comer & Beber (Eat & Drink).  In 2011 there were 20 separate editions published, from Porto Alegre in the far south of Brazil to Manaus in the middle of the Amazonian rain forest, and from 50-year-old Brasília to almost 500 year old Salvador. In each edition, the best in the city are honored in three major categories (restaurants, bars, and snacks) and many separate sub-categories, such as the best Italian restaurant, the best Brazilian restaurant, the best seafood, the best steak, etc. For each edition, the jury also chooses a "chef of the year" for the city.

Being included in the list of Veja's best is considered a high honor, and recipients in each category receive a wall-plaque indicating their status. The plaque is almost always prominently displayed somewhere near the entrance of the establishment, as a notification to potential customers, and the most highly honored restaurants often have a wallful of plaques from previous years.

In Salvador, the capital of Bahia state, and the spiritual home of the Afro-Brazilian cuisine of Bahia, one of the most coveted honors is to be voted the best maker of acarajé in the city. Acarajé, a delicious and addictive street food, is to Salvador what the coney island hot dog is to New York - a culinary icon for the culture of Bahia. It's also Bahia's collective Proustian madeleine - acarajé's utterly unique taste and aroma are potent emotional reminders of all that Bahia is, and the first bite of a piping-hot acarajé for a Bahian returning from a time away, or for a tourist coming back to Salvador for a second or fifth or fifteenth time is a gustatory key to unlocking memories of of previous times in the capital.

By law, acarajé must be sold in the traditional manner, by a woman dressed with at least some reverence to traditional Bahian dress, and cooked on site on the sidewalk, in a square or in a park. The way acarajé is sold has been enshrined as part of Brazil's immaterial cultural patrimony, and the sale of acarajé by baianas (as these women are called) even has it's own national day of celebration.

In it's 2011-2012 edition, Veja's jurors for Salvador, who all live in that city, chose the acarajé cooked and sold by Jaciara de Jesus Santos, known to all as simply Cira, as the best in Salvador. In its guide, Veja justified its choice of Cira this way (translated by Flavors of Brazil):

Around 10 in the morning, when the dendê oil is just beginning to be heated up, the first clients of the day have already begun to position themselves around the tabuleiro (a small tray to hold all the ingredients required to prepare acarajé) that Jaciara de Jesus Santos, or Cira, inherited from her mother more than forty years ago in Itapuã. From lunchtime on, especially on weekends, customer traffic increases and the line-up lengthens, but no one seems bothered by the wait. The wait, in fact, is part of the whole experience for residents of Salvador and for tourists, who not uncommonly are already on the way to the airport and who stop to carry to a far-away relative or friend the best acarajé in Salvador, according to Veja's jury. With a texture that is crunchy on the outside and light and fluffy inside, Cira's  fritter made from black-eyed pea flour adds generous complements of flavor-balanced vatapá, chopped green tomato salad, and if the customer wishes, a large portion of reconstituted dried shrimp. An acarajé costs R$4 (USD $2.50) or R$5 (USD $3) if you wish to add the shrimp. As well as acarajé, Cira sells bolo de estudante ("students' cake) for $R2.50 and cocada sweets for R$3. From Friday through Sunday, the presence of Cira herself is guaranteed. Her daughter Jussara and granddaughter Aline are in charge of Cira's two other locations, at Largo da Mariquita and in Lauro de Freitas, respectively.

Cira's stand is located on Rua Aristides Milton (no number) in the seaside district of Itapuã, very close to Salvador's International Airport. If you arrive in Salvador by plane, you can make Cira's acarajé your first bite of Bahia, and before you fly away, you can repeat the procedure on the way to the airport. You'll not forget it, nor her.

RECIPE - Fish Moqueca (Moqueca de Peixe)

The bright orange palm oil dendê, featured in yesterday's post on Flavors of Brazil, is closely connected in most Brazilians' minds to the cooking styles of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia, where African cultural traditions have survived the longest and are the most vibrant of any place in Brazil.

One of the most characteristic cooking techniques in Bahia is called moqueca, and there are hundreds if not thousands of moquecas to be found in Bahia. One of Brazil's most authoritative dictionaries, Houaiss, defines a moqueca as:

a stew of fish, seafood, meat or eggs, made with coconut milk and  dendê oil plus seasonings (cilantro, onion, bell peppers, dried shrimps and chili peppers), cooked preferably in a clay casserole and served in the same dish. [Originally from northeastern Brazil, especially Bahia, but now considered characteristic of Brazilian cuisine in general, being found in various states of Brazil.]

Since the etymology of the word moqueca traces it back to an African word mu'keka meaning "fish chowder" or "fish stew" it's probably true that the first moquecas used fish as their principal ingredient and that other variations followed. So to begin with the beginning, here's a recipe for fish moqueca that comes from Bahia.
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RECIPE - Fish Moqueca (Moqueca de Peixe)
Serves 4

2 lb (1 kg) snook, grouper, or other firm, non-flaking white fish, cut into steaks or large chunks
juice of 1 lemon
salt and black pepper to taste
1 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
4 medium tomatoes
1 medium green bell pepper
1 medium red bell pepper
1/4 cup firmly-packed chopped cilantro
3 Tbsp dendê oil (click here to read about purchasing and about substitutes)
2 cups coconut milk
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Season the fish with the lime juice, olive oil and salt and pepper to taste. Reserve, marinading, for 30 minutes.

In a blender or food processor, blend the tomatoes, the onion, peppers and the cilantro until you have a homogenous but still slightly chunky liquid.

In a large frying pan, head the dendê oil, then add the mixture from the blender and cook for about 5 minutes, or until the sauce is hot and bubbling. Add the fish, covering the pieces with the tomato mixture and cook for one or two minutes. Stir in the coconut milk, bring to a simmer and cook for about 25 minutes, or until the fish is completely cooked and the sauce has thickened.

Serve in a decorative bowl, preferably of unglazed earthenware, garnished with cilantro leaves, a few rings of onions and bell peppers if desired. Accompany with white rice and a good, preferably homestyle hot sauce.

Recipe translated and adapted from Cozinha Regional Brazileira by Abril Editora.

INGREDIENTS - Dendê Oil (Azeite-de-dendê)

Fruits of the Dendê palm

Back in the earliest days of this blog, in the middle of a recipe post for an Italo-Brazilian-fusion risotto, we published some basic information about an edible oil called dendê that is an essential element of traditional Brazilian cooking, most particularly the African-influenced cuisine of the state of Bahia. Bahian cooking without dendê is unthinkable. It's an almost-omnipresent ingredient there and an essential part of the typical Bahian flavor profile.

Because of its importance to Brazilian gastronomy, and because many of this blog's readers have expressed interest in this shockingly bright orange oil, we thought that dendê deserved a post of its own. And so here it is.

Dendê oil comes from the fruit of the African Oil Palm (Elaeis guineensis), native to West Africa in the region from Angola to Gambia. Mature oil palms grow to great heights, up to 60 feet (approx. 20 meters) and produce a brilliant red fruit. It's from the pulp of this fruit that dendê oil is processed. The kernel of the fruit also is a source of oil, but that oil is called palm kernel oil in English and its use is restricted to soaps and cosmetics. The edible oil comes from the pulp.

The African Oil Palm (and naturally dendê oil) arrived in Brazil along with the millions of African slaves which were brought to this country to work the gold mines and on the sugar and cotton plantations. Even today, those areas of Brazil which have a higher black population are likely to consume more dendê, especially in those areas, like Bahia, where African cultural traditions are still vibrant. But dendê is eaten all throughout Brazil, though not always in the quantities that it's eaten in Bahia. It is still a highly-inmportant edible oil in West Africa, its original territory.

Dendê oil and its consumption by humans is a controversial topic among botanists and nutritionists. On the positive side, the bright red-orange color of the oil is due to the presence of high levels of carotenes - alpha-carotene, beta-carotene and lycophene. These phytonutrients are all highly beneficial to humans and have significant anti-oxidant properties. Studies show that dendê has up to 15 times as much beta-carotene as carrots. It is also a source of tocotrienol, part of the vitamin E family.

On the other hand, dendê oil is highly saturated, and the consumption of large quantities of saturated fats has been shown to have deleterious health effects in humans, primarily an increase in cholesterol levels.  Dendê does not contain cholesterol, only animal fats do that, but highly-saturated fats can contribute to increased levels of cholesterol in humans, both LDL ("bad" cholesterol) and HDL ("good" cholesterol).

Because it is a saturated fat, palm oil is a valuable source of edible oil in the processed food industry. Saturated fats do not become rancid quickly and can be heated to high temperatures without burning. Because of this much of the world's supply of palm oil is processed for use in the food industry, and during this processing loses much of its nutritional benefit without losing any of deleterious qualities. Fortunately, as its used in traditional Brazilian cooking, unprocessed dendê oil is desired and in most cases only a small amount of that, so food scientists say that eating dendê the way Brazilians do isn't damaging to one's health.

In traditional Bahian cooking, dendê oil is used as a cooking fat in dishes such as acarajé, the iconic dish of Bahia, and as a flavoring ingredient in many of the most well-known Bahian dishes - xinxim de galinha, various moquecas, bobó de camarão, vatapá and others. As a flavoring ingredient it is most commonly combined with coconut milk, chili peppers and cilantro. It's the combination of these ingredients that for many people make a dish definably Bahian. Dendê oil is also an important ritual food in the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé.

Artisanally-produced dendê oil

Because of its distinctive color and flavor, there really are no acceptable substitutes for dendê oil in recipes which call for it. The color can be approximated by the use of annatto oil, but the taste is unique. It can be purchased outside Brazil in markets which cater to Brazilian expatriot communities. It can also be found, often more easily, in market which sell African foods, or which cater to African communities. In most of these shops it will be called simply Palm Oil, or African Palm Oil. It can easily be identified by it's bright color and by the fact that some or all of the oil will be solid at room temperature.

FRUITS OF BRAZIL - Tamarind (Tamarindo)

reconstituted tamarind pulp

Of the many species of tropical fruit trees, none is more widely distributed than Tamarindus indica, which is known in English as the tamarind tree and in Portuguese as the tamarindeiro. Although its scientific name would indicate that it is native to India (indica) it actually originated in the savannas of Africa and still grows wild there. It was carried to South Asian in earliest times and today the Indian subcontinent is where the majority of the world's tamarind tress grow. It is also extensively cultivated in the North and Northeast of Brazil, and was brought to this country from India by Portuguese navigators, traveling from India to Brazil by way of Portugal.

The tamarind tree is valued not just for its fruits, but also as an ornamental tree. The tree is slow-growing and reaches tremendous age and size. It can reach up to 100 feet (30 meters) high, with a spread of 40 feet (12 meters) and trunks have been measured up to 25 feet (approx. 8 meters) in circumference. Its foliage is bright green, fine and feathery. The fruit, which is actually an elongated seed pod, is a velvety light brown with a juicy, acidic pulp surrounding the seeds in immature fruits. In dried, mature fruits, the pulp becomes less liquid and more of a paste than a pulp.

Tamarind pulp is valued in traditional Brazilian cuisine, and in many tropical cuisines elsewhere, for its acidity, which perks up and enlivens a dish just as a splash of fresh lime or lemon juice does. It is an important ingredient in sauces, preserves and chutneys. Part of the flavor profile of Worcestershire sauce comes from the presence of tamarind. The pulp can also be thinned out with water and sweetened with sugar to make a refreshing tart drink. This tamarind "juice" is very popular in the heat of northern Brazil and is considered to have significant cooling properties. Brazilians often "prescribe" tamarind juice for digestive problems.

The tamarind does have scientifically proven medicinal value, for many purposes, not just as a digestive. Because of its high levels of vitamin C it is a powerful antiscorbutic, and the pulp has value as a laxative as well. Native folklore also attests to the hangover-reducing properties of tamarind juice.

Fresh tamarinds are available in supermarkets in some regions of Brazil. In other regions, frozen pulp, completely natural, is available in market freezers and can be reconstitued with water to make juice or merely thawed when pulp is called for.

In upcoming posts, we'll feature some traditional recipes from Brazil which call for tamarind. In North America you can sometimes find fresh tamarind in Latin or Asian food markets, and in those same markets you can find semi-dried pulp in small packages. By soaking this pulp in hot water and removing the seeds you can make your own ready-to-use tamarind.

How to Make Your Own Hot Sauce - Brazilian Style

Obviously, a blog that concerns itself with Brazilian food and Brazilian cooking traditions is going to spend some time discussing hot chili peppers. Though some regional cuisines of Brazil do entirely without chilis, they are in the minority. (Most of these regional cuisines are in the southernmost part of the country, which is not tropical and which has a population of mostly European ancestry).

Chilis are native to the hot-climate zones of the Americas and have been consumed in Brazil for millennia. The native population used chilis to season and to preserve foods long before the arrival of Europeans. The slaves who were transported from Africa to Brazil took enthusiastically to chilis upon their arrival. Even European culinary traditions were perked up with a dash of chili in Brazil.

Flavors of Brazil already has a significant number of posts about chili peppers. You can use the search box on this page or the Flavors of Brazil labels to track them down. We've discussed the botany of the capsicum family of plants, we've talked about the quest for the world's hottest pepper, and we have demonstrated how to preserve chili peppers at home in vinegar or cachaça.

We think that one of the most useful chili peppers products to have in one's kitchen, particularly when faced with a Brazilian recipe that calls for some heat, is in the form of a hot-chili sauce. A hot sauce is not the same thing as preserved chilis. Preserved chilis are left whole, or at most halved, and depend on the preservative powers of vinegar or cachaça. When they are used in the kitchen, it isn't the chilis themselves that go into the dish, it's the preservative liquid, which in the meantime has picked up flavor and piquancy from the chilis. The chilis themselves are not eaten and in the end are discarded.

In a hot sauce, however, the body of the chili becomes part of the sauce, and so the sauce has much more of the heat and the fruity flavor that a hot chili provides. Think of Tabasco sauce or any other bottled hot sauce. The ingredients are chilis, vinegar, flavoring ingredients and salt. These are combined, blended and bottled, resulting in a sauce which can be added to almost any dish in exactly the quantity desired.

It's this ability to control the amount of chili "heat" that makes hot sauce so useful in the kitchen. If you're making a stew, for example, and want to perk it up but not make it fiery, adding hot sauce drop by drop and testing after each addition allows precise control of the heat. If you're working with whole chilis you can control the heat a bit by adding only one chili or two, but you don't have the same control. Sometimes even one chili is too much, and if you cut a chili in half you don't necessarily cut down on the heat. That's where hot sauce steps in.

Brazil has thousands of hot sauces sold commercially, including American-made Tabasco sauce by the way. Many are cheap industrial products that add little to a dish but heat, though there are many, many wonderful sauces as well. However, it's so easy to make hot sauce at home and the result is so superior to almost any commercial product that it's worth the effort to make you own at home. It will taste better than just about any store-bought sauce, it will have just the potency you want, and just like a favorite perfume can become your fragrance identifier, your homemade hot sauce can add your own identity to your spicy dishes.

Next round on Flavors of Brazil we'll detail exactly how to make your "signature" hot sauce.

RECIPE - Shrimp Bobo (Bobó de Camarão)

This classic dish from the state of Bahia is one of the cornerstones of the Afro-Bahian tradition of cooking that is so strongly linked to the state and to its capital, Salvador. It contains most of the fundamental ingredients in the Bahian cook's larder - manioc, coconut milk (lots of it!), dendê palm oil and the sweet fresh shrimps for which Brazil's north-east coast is so famous.

A bobó is a manioc cream or puree, which can be served unadorned or finished with shrimp or other protein.  Depending on the recipe and on the cook the puree can be as thin as a soup or something more substantial. The word bobó comes to Brazil from the language of the Ewe people who inhabited current-day Ghana, Togo and Benin and who were brought to Brazil as slaves in large numbers during the era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In their language, bobó means "a dish made with beans." Today, there are no beans in bobó, at least in Brazil. Instead the cream is made with manioc, a native South American staple and one to which Afro-Brazilian slaves took enthusiastically when they were introduced to it in the New World.

For anyone who has any culinary curiousity or interest in Brazilian cooking and eating traditions, going to Salvador or anywhere else in Bahia and not trying bobó de camarão at least once would be nearly as great a gastronomic sin as not trying acarajé while visiting Bahia. (Nearly as great, but not quite). Fortunately, bobó de camarão is easy to find in restaurants that feature local dishes and is a staple dish on buffet tables in Bahian self-serve restaurants. It's also quite easy to make, and can be a great centerpiece for a casual dinner for a small group.  This recipe serves 8 well. White rice is an obligatory side dish, and if you add a green salad you have a complete meal.

The only ingredient that can be difficult to source outside Brazil (and which is absolutely necessary in a bobó) is the shockingly-brilliant orange palm oil called dendê. In North America and Europe it can be ordered online, or usually can be sourced in Latin American and African food markets. If the product is destined to the African trade, it might just be labelled "palm oil" - if it's orange and solid or semi-solid at room temperature, then it the right stuff. Manioc is available in the same markets, though it may be labelled cassava root, or yuca depending on the ethnic variety of the market.
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RECIPE - Shrimp Bobo (Bobó de Camarão)
Serves 8

For the manioc cream:
2 lbs (1 kg) cooking onions, peeled and chopped
2 lbs (1 kg) firm, ripe tomatoes, seeded and chopped
2 green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
4 Tbsp finely cilantro, finely chopped
2 lbs (1 kgs) manioc/cassava/yuca root, peeled, boiled and mashed
2 cups (500 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
4 cups (1 liter) coconut milk

For the shrimp:
4 lbs (4 kgs) medium or large shrimp, peeled, deheaded and deveined, with tails left on
1 clove garlic, minced
1 Tbsp salt
2 Tbsp cilantro, finely chopped
3 medium tomatoes, seeded and chopped
3 medium onions, chopped
1 green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
1/2 cup (125 ml) extra-virgin olive oil
4 cups (1 liter)coconut milk
2 Tbsp dendê oil
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 Prepare the manioc cream:  In a large heavy saucepan, combine the onion, tomatoes, green pepper and cilantro with the mashed manioc. Stir in the olive oil and coconut milk, then heat over medium-high heat, stirring constantly. Cook for 10 minutes, stirring constantly, or until the cream begins to pull away from the bottom of the pan when you stir. Remove from the heat and reserve.

Prepare the shrimp: Rinse the shrimp well in plenty of cold running water. Drain. In a large, deep saucepan combine the drained shrimp, chopped garlic, salt, cilantro, tomatoes, onions, green pepper and the olive oil. Heat over medium high heat, stirring frequently. When hot, add the coconut milk in 1/2 cup amounts, stirring after each addition to completely mix. Continue to cook for 5 minutes more, stirring constantly.

Add the reserved manioc puree to the shrimps and continue to cook for 5 more minutes, stirring frequently. Just before removing from the heat, add the dendê oil and mix it in completely. Remove from heat, pour into a decorative deep serving platter, sprinkle with additional cilantro if desired and serve immediately.

Acaçá - Candomblé's Most Important Ritual Food

Take a look at the photo above, one of a series of photographs which we've been publishing the last few days highlighting the intimate connection between the ritual foods of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé and the traditional cuisine of Bahia, Brazil. You might notice that every one of the ritual dishes in the photograph is topped with a elongated-pyramid-shaped mass of pure white. This is acaçá (prounounced a-ka-SA), the most important of all ritual foods, and the only one whose presence is obligatory at all Candomblé rituals.

For all its importance, acaçá is a very simple preparation. It is simply a thick mush made from grated or ground white corn wrapped and shaped in banana leaves. By itself it has little flavor, although it picks up the flavor of whatever dish it accompanies.

So why is this one food so important in Candomblé? We thought it might be best to let a practitioner of Candomblé explain. The following is our translation of a post about acaçá from the Portuguese-language blog A Tradicional Religião Africana (Traditional African Religion):

The basic definition of acaçá is a mush of grated or ground white corn wrapped, while still hot, in a banana leaf. There is nothing wrong with this definition, but it is extremely superficial because acaçá is by far the most important food of Candomblé. Its preparation is itself a form or ritual or offering, involving rigorous precepts and regulations which may not be disregarded.

All of the orixás [the gods and goddesses of Candomblé], from Exu to Oxalá, are offered acaçá. All the ceremonies from the most simple ebó to the sacrifice of an animal include acaçá. Ritual initiations, funeral rites and anything else that happens in a house of Candomblé only happens in the presence of acaçá. Life and death in Candomblé proceed from this fundamental offering, without which no one is saved from the troubles and disappointments of destiny. When we look back at the history of the orixás, we can see the great evil of a human race distanced from divine power, represented in this case by the powerful Orun, the dwelling place of all humanity, and by the Great Lord of Human Destiny, Olodumaré.

There is only one offering capable of reconstituting axé [the vital force of life] and creating peace and prosperity on Earth, and that is acaçá. But what makes this seemingly simple food the most powerful offering to the orixás? Who can tell us what an acaçá really is?To understand this question, let's make a list of the component elements of acaçá. First, it's important to make clear that the paste of white corn soaked for several days and then pounded in a mortar and pestle is in fact called eco. A portion of this eco, still hot, is wrapped in a banana leaf to harden and take shape and only then does the name acaçá apply. (Today it is possible to buy pre-ground white corn flour, but traditional priests often still use the old method of mortar and pestle to make eco.)

PHOTO GALLERY - Foods of the Gods, Part Two

Continuing with the gallery of photographs from the temples and kitchens of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé that began yesterday at Flavors of Brazil in this post. Many of these photos come from the market of São Joaquim, located near the center of Salvador, the present-day capital of the state of Bahia, and for more than two centuries (1549-1763)the capital of Brazil. Salvador is known for its distinctive music, architecture, cuisine and religion, all of which share deep African roots. Since more than 80% of Salvador's population has Black African ancestry, it's entirely logical that this be so.


(Remember to click the photos to see them full-size.)

Volunteers at the Umbanda center of "Father" Raimundo Troccli make a sacrificial offering of a rooster purchased the previous day at the market for 50 reais (about 25 USD)

At "Father" Raimundo Troccli's Umbanda center volunteers Graciliano Neto, 24, and Ailda Ferreira, 48, prepare basic seasonings.

Ingredients for foods of the gods can be found at São Joaquim Market, in central Salvador.

"Father" Raimundo Troccli chooses a live rooster for sacrificial offering at the São Joaquim Market.

Bottles of dendê oil at the São Joaquim Market in central Salvador.

Dried shrimps at the São Joaquim Market.

Okra, a ritualistically important food, at the São Joaquim Market in Salvador.

A basket of pomegranates at the São Joaquim Market.

Grating fresh coconuts at the São Joaquim Market.

Black-eyed-peas at the São Joaquim Market in Salvador.

Dried white corn at the São Joaquim Market.

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