Recife's Surprising Favorite Beach Snack - Soup!

When you're at the beach on a hot and sunny day and you start to feel peckish, what perks your appetite? A cooling fruit salad? A bowl of gazpacho? A chilled, frosty drink? If you're from Recife, in Brazil's always-tropical northeast, it's not like to be any of those things. What makes your mouth water on a scorching afternoon at the beach is a cup of hot soup.

Hot soup?

That's right, in Recife, according to a survey by the city's municipal government and judging by the number of soup vendors that populate the city's most popular beaches, what beachgoers want is a cup of soup (called caldinho or "little soup" in Portuguese), steaming hot. Whether it's bean soup, shrimp soup or fish soup, soup is what hits the spot in Recife.

There is a scientific basis to this predilection for hot soup on a hot day. Ingesting hot food causes the body to sweat, and as the sweat evaporates, it cools the body. It's for the same reason that Thai food, Indian food and other cuisines from hot climes are often spicy - the chiles cause sweating, which cools the body. It's counter-intuitive, but it does work. And it seems that Recife's beach crowd has figured it out.

The garnishes that accompany caldinho are almost as important to customers as the soup itself, according to many of the ambulant vendors that walk the beach all day long, dishing out plastic cups of soup from a thermos jug and adding garnishes according to the customer's desires. Traditional accompaniments include quails' eggs, torresmo (pork rinds), corn kernels and olive slices.

In addition to ambulant vendors, there are beachside stands that sell soup to walk-up customers, and in the most popular of those, it's not uncommon to sell 80 liters (80 quarts) of soup on a weekend afternoon. Many of the stands are weekend-only propositions and are staffed by members of a single extended family.

Customers and vendors alike stress the importance of sanitation and hygiene, and regular beachgoers often have their own list of trusted vendors, from whom they buy caldinho exclusively. Vendor José Carlos da Silva, who has 20-years' experience selling soup on Recife's beaches, points out that the hot soup itself is normally safe to eat, but that one must take extra care when choosing the accompaniments which are normally at ambient temperature.

Coming up in our next posts are some typical caldinho recipes from northeastern Brazil. They're great whether served on a tropical beach, or in a snowbound cabin in the mountains.

The Beirute - A True-Blue Brazilian Sandwich Classic

Just as French toast didn't really originate in France, the sandwich known universally in Brazil as a beirute wasn't invented in the Lebanese capital. It was invented, created or put together for the first time in Brazil's largest metropolis, São Paulo.

French toast's anonymous creator chose the name he (or more likely, she) did not because the dish came from France, but more as an homage to France and French cooking, a recognition that the dish was inspired by French cooking techniques and ingredients. Brazil's beirute sandwich was given its name for similar reasons.

Levantine immigrants, Brazil, early 20th century

In the early years of the 20th century, burgeoning São Paulo received a large number of immigrants from the Old World, and among them were significant numbers of immigrants from the Levant, specifically from Syria and Lebanon. They prospered in Brazil and their community grew to be one of the most important ethnic communities in the giant melting pot that is São Paulo. In fact, at present both the mayor of the city of São Paulo, Gilberto Kassab, and the governor of São Paulo State, Geraldo Alckmin, have Lebanese background. Current estimates of the number of Brazilians who identify as purely or partially of Lebanese of Syrian stock is between 10 and 13 million.

One of the foods that these immigrants from the Levant brought with them from their homeland was the round, often pocketed flatbread called pão sírio (Syrian bread) in Portuguese and best known in English as pita bread. Variations of this bread can be found throughout the Balkans, Greece, Turkey and the Middle East, and in Brazil, pão sírio is now considered an integral part of Brazilian food culture.

No doubt it was the Levantine bread used that caused the sandwich to be called beirute, because it's the one essential ingredient of a beirute. The meat, cheese and everything else that goes into the filling can vary from place to place and from restaurant to restaurant, but if it's not served on pão sírio, it's not a beirute.

Most typical recipes, however, do include some sort of cold meat and slices of cheese, making the sandwich a member of the Brazilian meat/cheese sandwich family along with the Bauru and the misto quente. The classic beirute is filled with sliced cold roast beef, sliced cheese, a fried egg, plus lettuce, tomato and mayonnaise. In a beirute, the filling goes between two whole pieces of pão sírio, not into the pocket, making the sandwich a true meal in itself. This is not finger food - a good beirute will fill the whole plate and requires nothing else to make a complete and satisfying lunch.