Feijoada is the “national dish” of Brazil the way hamburgers are the “national dish” of the US. Americans surely eat more pizza than hamburgers, but people outside of the US associate hamburgers with Americans. The same way people outside of Brazil associate feijoada with Brazilians, even though there are other foods that are far more commonly consumed in Brazil.
Feijão is Portuguese for bean, and the suffix –ada is added to food names to describe a dish based on, or at least heavily flavored by, that food. Meat sautéed with onions is described as “acebolada”, food with a lot of chili peppers is described as “apimentada.” And anyone who eats feijoada will understand this – the beans are the main part.
(I once met an unpleasant man who had worked for the foreign service, in Eastern Europe and in Brasília. He had been told, and believed – despite what should have been some familiarity with the Portuguese language – that feijoada was Portuguese for “lots of pork.” He described feijoada as “every part of the pig but the squeal,” but somehow neglected to mention that beans are involved. As a result I imagined, until I saw it, that feijoada was something much more exotic than it is. He also heard somewhere, apparently, that every city has its own traditional feijoada day and that Brasília’s day happened to be Saturday. But feijoada is served on Saturday all over Brazil, and Brasília hasn’t been around long enough to have much in the way of tradition. But enough about him.)
Feijoada was, according to the generally accepted history, slave food. Whatever bits and pieces of meat that were left over, or that couldn’t be cooked any other way (pigs’ feet, ears, and tails, for example) were thrown in the pot with the beans. Saturday is the traditional day to eat feijoada, but people make it in their homes on Sundays as well, and restaurants serve it on different days. Friday, in particular, is a good day to find feijoada in downtown areas near office buildings. It is important to point out that Brazilians would never think of eating feijoada for anything but lunch.
Now all Brazilians eat feijoada, regardless of their class or status. Feijoada takes hours to cook, so it isn’t worth the trouble to make only a small amount. (Feijoada freezes very well, and everyone knows that it tastes better after spending a few weeks in the freezer.) Feijoada is, like everything else in Brazil, a party. Large groups of people congregate in one house, drinking beer from 10 or 11am on, as one or two people (almost invariably the girlfriend/wife of the man who lives there and a female friend/relative of hers) stay in the kitchen making the feijoada. (They join the party later, don’t worry.) When feijoada is used with the indefinite article it means a party of this nature.
Feijoada is served over rice, accompanied by farinha or farofa. Farinha is a flour made from sweet cassava, and farofa is farinha fried, usually in butter, with any number of additions – onion, carrot, pumpkin, shredded beef, or bacon, to name a few. Traditionally it is also served with couve à mineiro – sliced collard greens fried in butter with bits of bacon and onion. Cachaça, a sugar cane liquor worth its own website, goes very well with feijoada (supposedly in São Paulo the feijoada is cooked with cachaça, but I don’t believe the source of that information), and after eating feijoada most people like to eat oranges.
Most Brazilians, the vast majority, believe that feijoada is difficult to make. It is not. (Brazilian supermarkets sell canned feijoada, but I can’t imagine buying it, and I have never seen anyone doing so. I asked a couple of friends about it, and they said that canned feijoada is for people who don’t know how to make feijoada. I told them it was easy to make, and they insisted that I am wrong. So maybe I’m doing it all wrong, because it sure seems simple to me.)
The basic ingredient is black beans. Lots of them. At least half a kilo, but if you have a big enough pot you should make a whole kilo. Let the beans soak overnight if you want, but the traditionally the beans are rinsed and then cooked without soaking. (If you soak the beans it is a good idea to cook the meat separately and then add it to the pot. Otherwise the meat might not cook completely. From here on I will assume that the beans are not soaked.) When you begin cooking the beans, dump all the meat in the pot as well. Traditional meats are sausage (specifically, cured low-fat sausage) sliced thinly across the link, pork loin and ribs, charque (jerky is a mispronunciation of charque), whatever kinds of pork are near at hand (and any bones with bits and pieces of meat on them), and the interesting parts of the pig that were mentioned above (I don’t care for the ear at all, the foot is okay, but the tail is particularly delicious). If you use charque, don’t put salt in the pot, if you don’t use it, then salt is necessary. That’s more or less the entire undisputed, uncontroversial part of the feijoada recipe. From here on out the opinions vary greatly.
Some people don’t season it any more than this. Other people add black pepper, cumin (and some don’t – one of my students jumped up out of his chair yelling his opposition to adding cumin to feijoada) or garlic. Some people add a tomato or two. Some people add onions. Others add (and I am a proponent of this idea) cilantro at the very end. Just a minute or two before turning off the flame, add chopped cilantro and stir it into the feijoada. Some people eat feijoada with bacon (or maybe that’s just fancy restaurant feijoada) – if you want to do that (it’s very good), cook and serve the bacon separately, because it will lose its flavor if it’s cooked with the beans.
After the feijoada is ready (you know what beans are like when they are fully cooked, same with meat, so I’m not going to say “cook it for x hours”, or anything like that), serve it as described above (with rice and farinha, at least, if not with couve à mineiro, cachaça, and oranges). The most important thing to remember is to eat too much. Do not exercise discipline. Do not refrain from eating thirds. Overindulgence is an important part of the feijoada tradition and is not to be neglected.
Hours after lunch, when you can move again, send me an email with your feijoada story.
