Review: In ‘Da Botica ao Boteco’, mixologist Néli Pereira shows that there is no Brazil without plants

Brazilian herbs, barks and roots break the boundaries of folk medicine, to which they were historically confined, and shine in national cocktails.

In “Da Botica ao Boteco”, a book recently released by Companhia de Mesa, Néli Pereira encourages the reader to discover the carqueja, the jurubeba, the catuaba, which make up the cosmos of her research.

Its guiding thread, unprecedented in the country’s bibliography, is the investigation of the flavor of plants. There are multiple experiments at her Espaço Zebra, in São Paulo, that lead the author to understand how they behave when soaked in different alcoholic bases.

Néli resorts to academic references to theorize, for example, about bottled drinks, one of the central objects of her career.

However, the narrative of his work is not academic, in which he emphasizes a literary language porous to orality (“the jurubeba is ‘tchubiruba’, pop queen of bottled drinks”); to interjections (“phew”, “damn”, “amen”); to onomatopoeia (the “ploc” of breaking the woody shell of annatto, in the best “ninahortian” style).

Her literary vein flirts with the novel in luminous passages in which she leads the reader, along with her, to Galeano’s house-laboratory and converses with him, for example, in the year 170.

It reaches a more distant past when it investigates ancestral history and Eurocentric memory. Part of the pharaohs in Egypt from 3150 BC, passes through China of the Zhou dynasty, arrives in Greece to exchange with Dionysus and Hippocrates, the “father of medicine”.

He lands in Brazil, flies over the native peoples, whose nature is an extension of the home, sees the colonizers invading the territory, the Jesuits and their pharmacies.

Néli invokes the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha, at the time of the Discovery, and characters such as Father Anchieta and the Marquis of Pombal to explain the spread and permanence of pharmacies in Brazil and the medicines made in large barrels, usually with herbs tanned in alcohol.

A single conviction crosses all times, countries and characters remembered in the work: there is no Brazil without a plant. The same goes for the concept of the cross—medicine or cocktail? Guided by this question, Néli looks for similarities between apothecaries, monasteries, and apothecaries.

Fortunately, the book is interspersed with texts dedicated to ingredients such as jucá, annatto and boldo, in which encyclopedic information is exposed, which serve as a preliminary to authorial reports.

The one from the butiá —a rounded coconut, with a yellowish and sour pulp — hosts a scene from his childhood, in the garden in front of his house, where he picked the fruits to eat, and their fibers were stuck to his teeth.

Although there are well-connected recipes, interspersed with preparation techniques and tips, this is not a Brazilian cocktail recipe book. The author proposes to provide the reader with knowledge about herbs, barks, roots and preparation techniques, to enable him to make his own alchemy.

The researcher surrounded herself with methods and care. She spoke with experts in botanists and pharmacobotanists to understand the respective toxicities of plants. She figured out where to find these popular culture ingredients, until she was sure where they came from.

Explored how to use them. He made tests to unravel its flavors and understand how they manifest in different alcoholic bases. Once identified, they start to compose a sensorial repertoire that gives more possibilities of creation and complexity to Brazilian cocktails.

Throughout this compilation of Brazilian plants, the author stimulates the reader. It gives rise to an interest in them—an interest that can contribute to the maintenance of several endangered species. Cocktails stand as a protectionist agent, preservation through use.

It provokes and feeds the discussion by punctuating the predatory extractive exploitation by the pharmaceutical industry and the inadequate management that the population makes of these plants, which leads to an impoverishment of taste and corrodes our biodiversity.

We don’t want the catuaba, for example, “to become a souvenir of another biome that ‘had but ended'”.

In retrospect, it shows how herbs are connected to offerings, to mandingas, to blessings, rituals considered dangerous witchcraft by the Portuguese.

Néli behaves like a modern cook — she looks for fresh ingredients and tries to imprint her own identity on the drinks, and personalize them. She emerges as a social mediator between producer (picker, picker) and consumer and, through the flavors she rediscovers in Brazil, re-enchants the world.

In “Da Botica ao Boteco”, the author strengthens the notion that no ingredient has a unique vocation —it depends on the value that human work attributes to it—, gives density to the concept of territory and provides us with some awareness of what makes Brazil , Brazil.