How three roots became one cuisine

I. The first root — Indigenous

Before the Portuguese arrived in 1500, the Amazon basin and the Brazilian coastline were inhabited by hundreds of distinct indigenous groups with distinct food cultures. What they shared was a foundation of native ingredients: manioc (cassava), corn, sweet potato, peanuts, native fruits, river fish and game.

Manioc is the ingredient that came forward most fully into modern Brazilian cuisine. It is eaten in more forms than almost any other ingredient on the continent — fresh, dried, fermented, pressed into starch, toasted into farofa, boiled, fried. The indigenous knowledge of manioc processing, including how to remove the cyanogenic glycosides from bitter manioc to make it safe to eat, passed into the broader culture and remains embedded in everyday Brazilian eating.

II. The second root — Portuguese

The Portuguese brought wheat, sugar, cattle, pigs, chickens, olive oil, wine, and a cooking tradition built around those ingredients and the preservation techniques developed over centuries of Atlantic navigation. Sugar changed everything. The colonial plantation economy required massive cultivation of sugar cane, which required imported labor.

Salt cod — bacalhau — came with the Portuguese and stayed. The technique of refogado — the Portuguese sofrito of onion, garlic, and tomato cooked in oil — became the foundation of the Brazilian kitchen regardless of regional variation.

III. The third root — African

The transatlantic slave trade brought approximately five million enslaved Africans to Brazil over three centuries — more than to any other country in the Americas. They came primarily from West and Central Africa and brought with them palm oil, okra, black-eyed peas, malagueta pepper, coconut, the cooking techniques of West African cuisine.

This food culture did not survive intact. It survived in fragments, in adaptations, in the cuisines that enslaved people built from a combination of their own knowledge and the ingredients available to them. Okra is African. Black-eyed peas are African. The technique of frying bean paste in hot oil — acarajé — is African. These are not Brazilian-African adaptations. They are African techniques that became Brazilian.

IV. What the synthesis produced

Feijoada is the standard example: black beans, salted and cured pork, the cooking technique a combination of African slow-cooking practice and Portuguese bean-pot tradition, served with farofa from indigenous cassava and rice brought by the Portuguese. This is not fusion. Fusion implies intention. Feijoada was not created by a chef. It emerged from the conditions of colonial Brazil.

Pão de queijo is cassava starch from the indigenous tradition, cheese and eggs from the Portuguese dairy tradition, shaped and baked in the tradition of enslaved cooks in Minas Gerais who fed the mining communities of the colonial interior. Three ingredients, three roots, one bread.

V. What is Brazilian food

Brazilian food is what happens when three culinary traditions meet without any of them having the option of remaining separate. It is the cooking of a country that was built on violence and produced beauty in spite of it and because of it.

The question of what is authentic in Brazilian cooking is a question that has no clean answer. What is authentic is the synthesis itself — the ongoing, unfinished process of producing something new from something forced together. To eat Brazilian food is to eat history that has not finished happening.

Recipe — Pão de queijo

Beatriz Salgado · Rio de Janeiro · three ingredients, three roots, one bread

• III roots, one bread
• 375°F oven
• 25 min bake
• ~20 small rolls

For ~20 rolls

• Tapioca starch (polvilho azedo, ideally) — 2 cups
• Whole milk — ½ cup
• Water — ¼ cup
• Neutral oil — ¼ cup
• Salt — 1 tsp
• Eggs — 2
• Parmesan, finely grated (or Parmesan + mozzarella) — 1 cup

The method

1. Preheat oven to 375°F.
2. Heat milk, water, oil, and salt together until just boiling. Pour over tapioca starch in a bowl. Mix until combined — the mixture will be shaggy and hot. Let cool 10 minutes.
3. Add eggs one at a time, mixing thoroughly after each. Add cheese and mix until incorporated. The dough will be sticky.
4. With oiled hands or a small scoop, form balls about 1½ inches in diameter. Place on a parchment-lined baking sheet with space between them.
5. Bake 20 to 25 minutes until puffed, golden, and hollow-sounding when tapped. They should have some give — pão de queijo is not crispy. It is chewy.
6. Eat immediately.

About the contributor

Beatriz Salgado

Beatriz writes about Brazilian food history and culinary synthesis from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. She is the author of two books on the colonial Brazilian kitchen and teaches food history at PUC-Rio.

Editor’s notes — the longer view

A note on the word «authentic». The question of what is authentic in Brazilian cooking has no clean answer because the cuisine itself is a record of contact, displacement, and improvisation. The synthesis is the authenticity. Authenticity here is a verb, not a noun.

A note on the polvilho. Tapioca starch comes in two forms: polvilho doce (sweet) and polvilho azedo (sour, slightly fermented). The traditional pão de queijo uses azedo, which gives the bread a tang and a more open crumb. Polvilho doce works and is more widely available outside Brazil.

A note on Minas Gerais. Pão de queijo is from Minas Gerais — the inland mining state where colonial Brazil’s gold and diamonds came from. The dish emerged in the kitchens of plantation households and the cooks who fed the mining communities, using local cassava in place of wheat and local cheese. The portable bread that travelled with the mule trains became the bread that travelled with the country.

A note on what is still happening. Brazilian cuisine is not a finished object. The Japanese-Brazilian community in São Paulo has created an entire dialect of cooking. The Lebanese diaspora has folded into Brazilian street food. New regional cuisines are being invented now. The cuisine you taste in Brazil this year is not the cuisine you would taste in twenty years.

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