Gastronomy built on fake news – 03/01/2024 – Cozinha Bruta

You’ve probably heard that Brazilian feijoada was created by enslaved workers, with the leftover meat that the big house gave them: pig ears, tails and feet.

Bullshit. Bullshit. Invention without (pig?) feet or head. The rich in those times only ate fresh tenderloin on the day the animal was slaughtered. The remaining meats were salted and smoked for future consumption, and this included the parts that today are considered inferior.

There was no meat left for the slaves, that’s the truth.

I’ve heard and read the refutation of this feijoada legend for decades, but it persists. Every now and then a chef or communicator appears spreading fake news about our national dish.

For these and other reasons, the initiative of three historians who dedicated themselves to seriously researching the origins of famous dishes is a great success: the Comer História project, the subject of a Folha report last Tuesday (26).

Taking information from one’s own ear – the hole allowed in this family reading – yields fabulous stories, much more exciting than reality.

This, in turn, has nuances that make it difficult to construct a palatable story. It is also full of gaps that prevent the frame from being completely assembled. There are many pieces of the puzzle missing.

If reconstructing the sequence of events of a well-documented war is already extremely difficult, imagine discovering what was going on in the kitchens inhabited by illiterate people.

Cuisine has always been transmitted through oral tradition, full of superstitions and idiosyncrasies and dogmas that no one dared to challenge.

For example, there was (is) a more or less widespread belief that grilling a steak at a very high temperature “seals” the meat. In other words, it creates a kind of shell that prevents moisture loss.

Totally false, and you don’t even need to study physics to verify it. The meat shrinks, loses weight, and almost all the weight lost is water (which you can see evaporating on the griddle).

It is disheartening that such myths survive well into 2024, when access to knowledge has already become commonplace.

Chefs still overvalue empirical learning and the teachings of their mentors, who learned from older mentors. Okay, that’s how you perpetuate a craft, but you can improve the scheme a little.

And so you turn on the TV and see a famous chef advising you to mix olive oil with butter to keep it from burning.

It’s something that has been passed down from generation to generation, forever, even though it has never worked (butter solids degrade in extreme heat, with or without olive oil).

Back to the story of feijoada, it’s the kind of thing that comes to mind, in a mix of sophistry and pure and simple kick.

Nowadays, pig tails are poor people’s food, something that disgusts rich people. We fill in the gaps in the story with our imagination and conclude that feijoada was born in the slave quarters.

It doesn’t matter that in Portugal (incidentally, the country that colonized Brazil) there is a very traditional dish of beans cooked with pork (incidentally, it’s called feijoada).

It only changes the color of the beans.

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