Couscous from São Paulo: why the dish is important for the country – 03/19/2024 – Food

Couscous is a dish of meaning in the home of chef and gastronomy teacher Aline Guedes, in São Paulo.

The “nordestino” ―corn flour, yellow, steamed and served with butter― brings back a taste of “home” for the family of Alagoas origins who moved to the capital of São Paulo in the 1960s.

“We ate at my aunt’s house. It was one of the few things that still connected our family to the Northeast, since my mother arrived in São Paulo when she was 7 years old, she even lost her accent”, says Guedes.

The “Paulista” – also made from corn, with a normally coarser flour, cooked in a pan, shaped, dense and decorated with peas, chicken, egg, sardines and whatever else you want… – is a reminder of the place in the house where the mother, maid, and teenage daughter shared the few moments together: the kitchen.

“I learned to cook with her there, when she came home from work. So, the way I prepare my food, my couscous, today is the way she did it”, says the chef who has already published her recipe on TV shows.

For this reason, Aline Guedes, who researches the history of Brazilian cuisine, especially its African heritage, has difficulty understanding the repulsion that São Paulo couscous receives today on the internet.

Just search for the name of the dish to confirm this perception. Some of the main results are not recipes ― as with other foods ― or tips from restaurants that prepare the dish. Instead, there are comparisons with leftover food in the sink drain or with other even less noble references.

To crown this bad reputation, at the end of 2023 the North American gastronomy guide TasteAtlas classified the dish as the “worst in Brazil”. The survey is based on the platform’s audience ratings.

And, even though finding a tasty dish depends exclusively on each person’s taste, researchers who study the history behind food advocate a new look at this dish, considered a heritage of the State of São Paulo.

“It’s an emblematic dish for family gatherings, full of affectionate memory”, says Katherina Cordás, director of the Tuju Research and Creativity Center, the scientific arm of the award-winning São Paulo restaurant. “And it is influenced by different food cultures and expresses our multiculturalism very well.”

‘Triad of Brazilian cuisine’

Couscous arrived in Brazil “carried in luggage” in the first centuries of colonization, explains Cordás.

Both the northeastern and the paulista refer to the couscous eaten in North Africa, a region that encompasses countries such as Morocco and Tunisia.

There, the recipe traditionally was (and still is) with wheat semolina, but it could also be prepared with rice or barley.

The presence of the Moors (Arabic-speaking Islamic people from North Africa) in the Iberian Peninsula until the 15th century and the presence of the Portuguese in African regions such as Ceuta, close to Moroccan territory, made the dish become popular in Portugal.

According to Cordás’ research, the first written record about couscous was in the 13th century, in the “Cuisine Book of the Maghreb and Andalusia in the Almohad Era”, by an unknown author. The word originates from the sound of steam in the couscous pan during cooking: kus-kus.

But the dish’s arrival in Brazil cannot be credited solely to the influence of the Moors in Portugal, as the couscous food culture first spread to other African regions – including places from where enslaved people were trafficked towards the Americas.

In the book “History of Food in Brazil”, the historian and sociologist Luís da Câmara Cascudo wrote: “It is certain that the Portuguese and Africans came to Brazil knowing about couscous. Here it was made from corn and dipped in milk Of coconut”.

The replacement of wheat by corn is well documented, an incorporation of a food already consumed by the original people of the Americas. “Corn couscous was a Brazilian, American solution, where Zea mayz (corn) dominated”, wrote Câmara Cascudo. Cassava flour also began to be incorporated into recipes

For Aline Guedes, seeing this complexity in the formation of couscous shows an understanding of Brazilian cuisine in a multicultural way, and not from a Eurocentric perspective. “It is a melting pot of this triad that theoretically forms Brazilian food culture,” she says, referring to European, African and indigenous peoples.

Katherina Cordás considers São Paulo couscous as a symbol “of a dish that brings many transformations” in its history, an example of the cuisine of a place that, like São Paulo, has historically attracted immigrants.

Northeastern x São Paulo

Much of the wave of criticism that São Paulo couscous receives on social media comes from direct comparisons with Northeastern couscous.

An X user (formerly Twitter) writes that the “Paulista version ruined the couscous”, which is “disgusting”. Others criticize the State of São Paulo in general and use memes.

Sociologist Marina Macedo Rego, who researches prejudice against Northeasterners at the University of São Paulo (USP), reflects that “stigmatized social groups resist the discrimination and prejudices of which they are targets in different ways, including through humor.”

She sees the rise on the networks of a discourse that tries to subvert the stigma that the Northeast has in the Center-South of Brazil, from an inferior region, and this ends up leading to certain rivalries. “This phenomenon, however, should not be seen as a type of prejudice, as it is a response to historical discrimination,” she tells BBC News Brasil.

But the truth is that the two versions of the dish have very different trajectories in Brazilian cuisine that must be respected, say the researchers.

In the Northeast of Brazil, couscous remained more faithful to the African “original”. In other words, more like an accompaniment to other dishes and loose.

Pernambuco anthropologist Fátima Quintas explains in her book “Segredos da Velha Arca” that couscous, during its arrival in colonial Brazil, was sold by black women who “used tinplate trays that sat on an X-shaped frame, which In addition, they contained products such as alfenim, rice pudding, alfalfa, jellies and others”. There are records of sales in cities such as Salvador, Maceió and Recife.

In São Paulo, he gained new guises. First, with the “mixture of meat, crustaceans and vegetables, which, in Brazil, was not usual”, as Câmara Cascudo recorded.

In the State of the bandeirantes, who opened paths towards the interior of Brazil, couscous takes on the appearance of an itinerant meal, composed of a mixture of pork flour, corn flour, fish (especially catfish), onion, pepper….

“It takes on elements from the coast, such as fish, seafood, and also from the countryside, such as pigs”, explains Katherina Cordás, from Tuju.

The most commonly told story is that the bandeirantes initially carried this flour mixed with other foods in a kind of lunchbox, tied to their horses.

“Later this pasta evolved into a dish made in the form of a holey cake, with the addition of eggs, sardines, tomatoes and hearts of palm, becoming an emblematic recipe”, recorded anthropologists Dolores Freixa and Guta Chaves in the book “Gastronomy in Brazil and in the World”.

Ugly dish?

For Aline Guedes, knowing the whole story behind the dish can spark interest in those people who are currently repelled by it. “When we understand the culture, the knowledge that is passed between generations, I think we see food in a different way”, says the chef, who ate a version of couscous from São Paulo even in a quilombo in Pará, with heart of palm and tucupi.

The only black girl when she studied gastronomy in the interior of São Paulo, Guedes noticed precisely the lack of references in Brazil to an ancestral and popular cuisine: “the recipe books that we access, or that my mother used at her boss’s house, were of recipes from German, Portuguese and Italian families. And there was no mention of Brazilian recipes, how Brazil transformed foods like couscous”.

The interest in tasting the dish can also come if we leave aside a discussion about aesthetics, according to Katherina Cordás — as São Paulo couscous is usually classified as “ugly” on the networks.

“I think this is a problem in contemporary gastronomy, many cooks think more about how the dish will turn out at the end than whether it actually tastes good”, says Cordás.

“A dish doesn’t have to be beautiful to be good. I personally think São Paulo couscous is super beautiful, because I find it very interesting to be able to see all the elements in the dish. But it’s a problem that you always want the food to be beautiful. What What matters is the taste, if you put it in your mouth and it’s pleasant.”