I launched a provocation on social media earlier today. I wrote the following on Twitter:
“Brazilians are not ready for this debate, but... A soft yolk fried egg over feijoada enhances the wonderfulness of the symbol plate of our national cuisinethere“. Then I repeated the joke on Instagram stories.
I had lunch, in fact, feijoada with fried egg. I had (I still have) feijoada that I prepared for Father’s Day lunch, but I no longer had cabbage or farofa. Eating only with rice seemed a little bland to me. Going shopping was out of the question when hunger struck.
Then I remembered that I had bought some fresh eggs at the organic fair at Parque da Água Branca. Good. A fried egg to compose Tuesday lunch. Lack of balance, I know.
There was a lack of green, it lacked texture, it lacked some acid component, there was fat left. It would be much better with kale and orange, the healthy pairing of feijoada.
But you can’t say that rice, beans, pork and fried egg is a strange or exotic combination. Much less that this combination displeases the Brazilian palate. It’s on the São Paulo side. It is in millions of PFs served daily. It’s too good.
I didn’t even take a picture of the plate of food because I made a very crude scheme, plate heated in the microwave, and the image was far from pretty. To illustrate, I put the image from five years ago of a breakfast at the fabulous Parador Hampel, in São Francisco de Paula, Serra Gaúcha. Countryside coffee. Campeiro beans, black and thick, with chunks of pork. And an egg on top.
It’s feijoada, but it has another name. Rice was missing. pity.
I found people’s reaction to my not-so-crazy idea amusing. Most, phew, understood the improvisation. The rest –this is the one I want to talk about– expressed disgust and revolt in different degrees of seriousness.
Cooking is transforming, with physical and chemical processes, ingredients that you mix. This mixture can obey almost objective factors – balance between acid and sweet, composition of textures, nutritional properties, etc. –, but it always follows a geographical and cultural pattern.
Mediterranean peoples eat tomato, eggplant, olive oil, chickpeas and drink wine because that’s what the land provides them with. People eat feijoada because it is a Portuguese habit adapted to the customs and conditions of Brazil – the “senzala hypothesis” for the invention of feijoada has long been lost.
The training of a cook –informal, intuitive training– comes in three stages. In the first, he reproduces established recipes. Then, with some mastery of the activity, he improvises within the traditional repertoire. Later, he gains confidence and begins to experiment outside this repertoire, shuffling the information he has accumulated with his own sensitivity.
The third stage is something quite common in haute cuisine, among cooks who have had formal training and cross, not always successfully, the cultural limits of food.
On the most mundane levels, in the realm of the food we actually eat, this boldness fails even when it works. Take the example of Japanese food and its dealings with Western elements.
Sushi with mayonnaise or cream cheese is a public success and critical failure. The incorporation of Japanese elements into Brazilian cuisine has advanced little beyond the Japanese community, which makes beans with gohan and has a seasoning that is unique to them. A shame, as the miso umami goes well with almost anything.
We no longer have restrictions on the movement of people and goods. You can browse other terreiros, which makes life much more interesting.
The rejection of different mixtures, in general, has nothing to do with the set of sensations of the resulting dish. Almost always, it is too attached to tradition. The fear of contaminating one’s own identity with foreign elements; or corrupting them by doing something different from what we learned from our parents.
The feijoada with egg fits the latter case.
Let’s eat feijoada with fried egg.
But maybe you’re not prepared for that.
(Follow and like Cozinha Bruta on social networks. Follow the posts on Instagram and twitter.)
