Festival do Plenty returns to the streets of Tiradentes with tribute to Inconfidência

On a street in Tiradentes, Minas Gerais, friends talk about cocoa, while others walk by carrying their wine glasses in hand. Nearby, Carmem Virgínia, the owner Carmen, asks about the onion point while she prepares a tidy one in the middle of Praça das Forras.

In another, at Rodoviária, there is a line to try casqueirado termite rice, also made live, and with portions served by the chef himself.

After two years with different formats imposed by Covid-19, the Tiradentes Culture and Gastronomy Festival returned, last Friday (19), to occupy the streets of the city. In the first year of the pandemic, it was online and, in the second, hybrid (in person and online).

“You had access to the chefs’ food [na pandemia], who reinvented themselves, set up delivery, but not to the chef, watching the person cooking, smelling it”, says Carolina Daher, curator of the event. “That’s why this festival is so special. People are hugging each other again, sharing food, getting dirty in the square, this is too ‘good’.”

Held by Fartura, the festival reaches its 25th edition this year and runs until next Sunday (28). Until then, it is estimated that around 60,000 people will pass through the historic center of the municipality, which has just over 8,000 inhabitants.

According to the director general of Fartura, Rodrigo Ferraz, the festival is projected to have an impact of around R$90 million on the region’s economy.

“Gastronomy is a great tool for economic and social development. The city has a growth of 10% a year. And the issue of tourism, as a factor of investment and return, is very big.”

In all, there are about 200 attractions, between gastronomic and cultural, concentrated mainly in three points of the center. In terms of gastronomy, there are special dinners in which chefs from restaurants in the city receive guests from homes in São Paulo, João Pessoa (PB), Salvador (BA), Belo Horizonte (MG) and Visconde Mauá (RJ) — all of which are sold out.

One of these dinners, scheduled for next Friday (26th) at the Tragaluz restaurant, will have the participation of Jefferson Rueda, from A Casa do Porco, elected the seventh best in the world, according to the 50 Best, one of the main awards in world gastronomy.

The next day, he is awaited at Praça da Rodoviária, where he must prepare a recipe live.

In the squares, there are stalls where chefs’ recipes can be tried for up to R$45, such as pastel de angu.

“It’s a very Minas Gerais thing, the dough is prepared with cornmeal”, teaches Carolina. “It’s very much ours, and it has different fillings, it has suckling pig, it has cheese.” Another example is the breaded chicken sandwich with okra mayonnaise from Pacato.

In their own way, all the recipes, both those prepared in the squares and in the restaurants, refer to Inconfidência Mineira, the theme of this year’s edition. The conspiracy, from the end of the 18th century, proposed the emancipation of part of the Brazilian territory and had Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, known as Tiradentes, as one of its main names.

“Inconfidência brings Minas Gerais as a pioneer in the issue of freedom, creativity”, says chef Morena Leite, from Capim Santo. She has participated in the festival since 2001 and in 2020 she became a curator.

The challenge posed to the chefs was to express this in their dishes, but related to Minas Gerais backyard cuisine — that is, food with ingredients that can be grown in the backyard, such as ora-pro-nóbis and taioba.

As in Minas, the themes of freedom and creativity should also be repeated in the national edition of the festival in the city of São Paulo between the 23rd and 25th of this month. The event will be held at the Museu da Casa Brasileira, in Jardins, west side.

The idea, according to Morena, is to bring together chefs from all states and the Federal District in the city. Your recipes will be prepared in the museum’s garden, with kiosks divided by the regions of the country: North, Northeast, Midwest, South and Southeast.

Special dinners will also be organized, in which guests are received, as well as classes and interactive kitchens.

In this edition, a novelty is the presence of chefs in each of the five regions of the capital as part of Bom Prato, a program of the São Paulo government with meals sold for R$ 1.

The museum should also exhibit products that originate in all states, but that can be found for sale in different parts of the city of São Paulo.

The items result from an expedition carried out in the city last month. “I stayed in São Paulo for four days because I wanted to find an ingredient from each state to tell people from São Paulo: ‘There’s no excuse, you can buy it here'”, says Carolina Daher. An example of this is a coffee shop in Rondônia.

If you are interested in any of them, visitors will have access to the point in the city where the product can be purchased.

In addition to São Paulo, Belo Horizonte should host an edition of Fartura later this year.

_{The journalist traveled at the invitation of Fartura}