Brazil
Feijoada, beef carved off the spit, a caipirinha in hand — a giant country that eats like a party.
On a Saturday the pot to find is feijoada: black beans stewed slow and dark with pork of every cut, ladled over rice with shredded collard greens, a dusting of toasted farofa and slices of orange to cut the richness — a caipirinha sweating on the table beside it. Brazil is a continent pretending to be a country, and the food shifts with the map, from the African-rooted north-east to the cattle-ranching south.
Nowhere shows the appetite better than the churrascaria, where waiters prowl the room carving fire-grilled beef off long skewers until you surrender and flip your card to red. Minas Gerais bakes warm, chewy pão de queijo cheese-bread; Bahia cooks with red dendê palm oil and coconut, turning out prawn acarajé fritters and clay-pot moqueca stew; and the Amazon spoons up açaí, thick, cold and deep purple. To drink, it's cachaça — raw sugarcane spirit — muddled with lime and sugar into that caipirinha, chased by a tiny, fierce cafezinho coffee.
- feijoada (black bean & pork stew)
- churrasco (spit-roast barbecue)
- pão de queijo (cheese bread)
- moqueca (coconut seafood stew)
- acarajé (Bahian prawn fritters)
- açaí (Amazonian berry bowl)
- brigadeiro (chocolate truffle)
