We were, me and the puppy, in the market of Rio Vermelho, in Salvador. In a way, it is a tourist attraction – much neater than the fairs in popular neighborhoods, but a thousand times less artificial than the Mercado Modelo, at the foot of the Lacerda elevator. From the accent, I realized that most of the visitors were from Bahia. Bahians with money and mostly white.
Ceasinha, as the market was nicknamed, has shops with a multitude of typical foods: smoked shrimp, flour, palm oil, fruits from the forest and the hinterland, seafood, pork offal for sarapatel, tapioca beiju.
An attached wing is reserved for bars and restaurants. We chose, for lunch, a bar called Catiguria, for two reasons: it was busy and it had an air-conditioned “aquarium” (I know that air conditioning is a bad choice when looking for authenticity, but I was looking for comfort and I got on well with the food).
It was Saturday, and the menu announced that, on weekends, the house offers feijoada. From the description of the dish, it was just like the feijoada we eat in São Paulo. I asked the waiter: “Don’t you serve Bahian feijoada?”.
“Iiiiiiih, boy, our feijoada is made with common beans”, the attendant replied in the negative, implying that the Bahian feijoada is too banal and that I wouldn’t like it. So I ordered smoked meat, smoked pork typical of the Recôncavo Baiano, with onions with tropeiro beans (in Bahian, cowpea farofa) and vinaigrette.
The Bahian feijoada is made with brown beans (called carioca or mulatinho) and has other peculiarities. It takes fresh beef (in addition to jerked beef) and, not infrequently, mocotó and beef tripe.
On this recent visit to Bahia, I noticed that the locals are letting the typical feijoada fall by the wayside. I managed to eat it on the penultimate day of the trip, at Senac in Pelourinho – a panel of traditional Bahian recipes served as an all-you-can-eat buffet at the school restaurant.
In the other places I went, the feijoada from the Southeast predominated, the “national” feijoada, with black beans, highlighted on menus, on signs and even on street posters.
Just passed through the tourist part of town? Yes, almost exclusively there. But it is also in this part that the rich and middle-class people residing in the city circulate – the infamous “opinion makers”, since we do not have the illusion that the gastronomy agenda is born in the C and D classes.
The gradual change from brown to black feijoada must have started in hotels, to serve foreigners and compatriots with less adventurous tastes. Then the local elite, who are constantly flying to Rio and São Paulo, began to prefer black beans. The trend, for Bahian feijoada, is to survive without fanfare in houses, fairs and restaurants for workers. Or, in the longer term, become a museum piece.
Before diagnosing a case of cultural oppression by the economic power of southern Brazil, it is interesting to note that an identical phenomenon, in the opposite direction, occurs in São Paulo. The couscous from São Paulo, shaped with sardines and vegetables, leaves the scene; the northeastern couscous, which was not seen here until a few years ago, is increasingly appearing.
In the last century, couscous from São Paulo frequented banquets and elegant restaurants, came in a cart of entrees whose prices were too bad to ask – you only found out, with displeasure, at the time of the bill.
Then an influential group on social networks decreed that couscous from São Paulo is ugly, it’s corny, it’s disgusting and shouldn’t even be called couscous. It’s no use defending São Paulo couscous on Twitter or on the blog, I can’t hold back this wave. Sardine couscous is destined to survive only in niches – in some corners of the coast of São Paulo and with the guardians of recipes from other times.
Food, like languages, is a constantly changing body and highly permeable to external influences. It is worth documenting and preserving habits, but it is a waste of time to try to stop the changes. The menu of the day is what we have for today.
(Follow and like Cozinha Bruta on social networks. Follow the posts on Instagram and twitter.)
