Comfort food to many means meat and potatoes or something that makes you feel warm and fuzzy (goulash is another example). However, to me that feeling comes from eating Brazilian food.
But when I mention the country, I don’t mean the meat-rich dishes made famous here in the United States via the many churrascarias that have spread around the country (I even ran into one in Cleveland a couple of years back), but the lesser-known ones from the northeastern part of the country.
Similarly to the rest of the Americas, Brazilian cuisine is highly influenced by the different immigrants who made the country their home throughout its history, such as Italians, Lebanese, Poles, Portuguese and Japanese.
Many dishes brought from those countries have been reinvented and adapted and are now identified as genuinely Brazilian, even if visitors recognize their origins when tasting them during their visits to the country.
When Renata and I were in Rio in 2009, they served jam-filled pancakes that she immediately identified as Polish nalesniki, but I am quite sure if we’d asked the cook he or she wouldn’t know that.
Germans brought their sausages and pork Kassel, the Italians their pasta and the Portuguese their love of seafood – which all came into the melting pot and became something new.
No continent, however, has influenced Brazil’s culinary as the West Africans brought to the country as slaves in the mid-16th Century. Many of these enslaved Africans worked in their masters’ kitchens and gradually changed their Portuguese dishes using materials found in the land.
read full article at Brazzil
Photo by sapienssolutions
