A 470 meter cake and horror scenes on SP’s birthday – 01/12/2024 – Cozinha Bruta

The rest of Brazil loves to talk bad about São Paulo and, we have to admit, sometimes it gets difficult to defend this land.

The city, which turns 470 years old on the 25th, resumes this year a tradition of its birthday party: the giant Bixiga cake, which had been suspended since 2021.

In theory, it is a cake that has one meter for every year of São Paulo’s age. It is therefore assumed that it will be 470 meters this year. It is not known whether a surveyor was hired to measure the length of the thing.

As there is no oven big enough to bake a cake like this, you must have already deduced that it is several cakes lined up on a set of tables arranged on the street.

In the 1990s, the fun of January 25th was turning on the TV to the lunchtime news to watch “congratulations” on Bixiga.

Exactly at noon, the cake was released to the crowd that gathered around the giant table. Residents of the neighborhood, homeless people, curious people and people who went to Bixiga to play the terror.

Armed with market bags, the masses of people threw themselves onto the cake dough. He swept the table with his arms, pushing as much food as possible into the bag.

Pigeons and stray dogs took care of the crumbs. The gigantic cake became a souvenir in seconds.

A professional colleague, now a respectable communications businessman, went to the party at Bixiga when he was a young reporter. He arrived a few minutes late and didn’t even smell the cake.

He went back to the newsroom and invented everything from his own head: the advance of the mob, the Swiss with the food, the housewife who guaranteed the family’s food for the rest of the week.

Regrettable conduct by the colleague, but the reality is that it didn’t matter. Cake day always went the same way.

Until an incident interrupted the ritual for nine years. The program Pânico na TV, under the pretext of covering the cake (covering it with news, not whipped cream), started a food fight during the 2008 celebration.

Cake flew from Avenida Paulista to Anhangabaú, and the image of the Bixiga party was smeared.

Despite the undeniable stupidity of the Pânico people, truth be told: Bixiga’s cake never needed them to sabotage its own reputation.

Without a food fight, the barbarian attack already produced Dantesque scenes – which generated sadistic pleasure and remorse in those watching on TV.

Culinary megalomania, obviously, is not an exclusive attribute of São Paulo residents.

At the end of last year, a party was organized in Vitória (ES) to break the record for the biggest moqueca from Espírito Santo in the world – something a little funny, since only in Espírito Santo would someone think of something like that.

The current mark is 600 kilos of fish with coriander. The intention was to overcome it with a ton of food in a 1.5 meter diameter clay pot.

They ended up breaking the pan, not the record, and the moqueca went bad.

I shared the episode with some people from Espírito Santo. Everyone said they were relieved with the failure of the giant moqueca.

“Food made in this quantity can’t be good”, said one of them. Really? Do the São Paulo cake people know this?

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