Opinion – Raw Cuisine: São Paulo, national capital of mortadella

One day, for lack of anything better to do, the city council of São Paulo awarded the city the title of “world capital of gastronomy”.

Okay, it was still the last century. São Paulo received bus caravans with elderly people from Bauru and Araraquara to have dinner in the Bixiga canteens after seeing a comedy at the theater. This may have impressed our councilors.

Let’s go and come, São Paulo’s megalomania already sounded ridiculous at the time. “New York doesn’t need to call itself the capital of gastronomy”, snarled Percival Maricato, representative of restaurant owners, in a text published by Sheet on September 3, 1997.

Reality, which had not been consulted, implacably imposed itself. A quarter of a century later, São Paulo consolidates itself as the capital. The national capital of bread with mortadella.

That says a lot about us. Says something that is not pleasant to hear. In a city that offers Congolese, Haitian, Vietnamese, Persian, Bolivian, Russian, Cameroonian, Egyptian, Filipino, Afghan, Armenian, Polish and Indonesian food, the biggest gastronomic attraction is a mortadella sandwich.

It’s nearly a pound of mortadella sandwiched between two fragile halves of French bread. There are people –and quite a few people– who face the crowds of Mercadão with a smile on their faces to taste this delicacy.

If the government has not been able to achieve the half-hearted claim to be a gastronomic capital, economic power is working hard to consolidate São Paulo as the land of mortadella.

The manufacturer of the best-selling brand of mortadella invented, during the city’s anniversary week, a so-called mortangüela week or something like that. He made the biggest forrobodó to ratify, on São Paulo soil, the world record for the longest mortadella sandwich.

After all, what seduces you about mortadella from Mercadão? You can’t even say that it’s a typical food – the sausage is an invention of the city of Bologna, Italy.

There is an Argentine documentary called “E il Cibo Va” (“And the Food Goes”, in Italian), which shows the transformation of the diet of immigrants from Italy in Buenos Aires and New York.

Accustomed to the scarcity of food, the colonists are dazzled by the abundance in the Americas. Expatriate, Italian cuisine puts its foot in the jackfruit. He abuses cheese, exaggerates the sauce, feasts on meat.

Something similar happened here in São Paulo, and I bet that the popularity of the mortadella monster from Mercadão fits the phenomenon.

With the aggravating factor that Brazilians love to ape Americans: they give them a hamburger with 18 meats, a nine-cheese pizza, a two-kilogram coxinha and an endless refill of soda. Symptomatic that Anthony Bourdain, chef but gringo, was delighted with the Mercadão sandwich.

If you, resident or visitor, are there, you might want to try the mortadella sandwich.

So, for your own good, follow this advice: take a breath, go out, cross Rua da Cantareira and eat esfiha in one of the Arab bars in the Kinjo Yamato market. Trust me, it’s a thousand times better.

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