By Roberto Khatlab*
The Brazilian feijoada is an expression of identity, memory, culture and cuisine in the cauldron of the mixed background of the Brazilian people. The dish is enjoyed across all social classes and is one of the icons of the country’s cuisine. On the other hand, in the Arab East, you can find an age-old dish made of ful or façulia, fava beans, called yakhné, a stew, a kind of Arab feijoada that is also enjoyed across all social classes. The concept of the two feijoadas is one and the same — gathering family and friends around the table.
In Brazil, it’s told from generation to generation that feijoada was created in the slave quarters by the enslaved Africans who cooked black beans with pork pieces discarded by the elite. A kind of folklore with African Brazilian socio-cultural lines was created to conceal the slavery period, when the enslaved were underfed.
The stew in the West
The West is the cradle of civilization and cuisine, and it’s important to understand the creation of the local feijoada within this context. A Sumerian-Akkadian bilingual dictionary of cuneiform script from 1,800 years before Christ was found featuring several recipes, including stews of meat and legumes like fava beans — al-ful in Arabic – cooked over low heat in a clay pot. The Bible (Second Book of Samuel 17:28) mentions – 6,000 before Christ – the stew as an energy food. The stew in question is the Arab marqat or yakhné, made of lamb – kharuf in Arabic – awassi, a fat-tailed sheep breed originated in the Syro-Arabian desert.
One of the first Arabic manuscripts, from the eighth century, came from Bagdad, Iraq, and is dubbed Kitâb al-Tabîkh al-Mahdî – Book of the al-Mahdi cuisine– while another from the tenth century is Kitâb al-Tabîkh Al-Warrâq – Book of the al- Warrâq cuisine. These are the oldest Arab cuisine manuscripts. The Bedouin caravans made the recipes reach other parts of the stark Arabian Peninsula and the Mediterranean.
Expansion of the Arab stew
In the eighth century, the Muslim Arabs conquered the Iberian Peninsula and brought cultures, customs, and items like white fava beans and rice. By he hands of Arab women, several Arab recipes reached Europe, including the lamb and fava stew. So were born Europe’s fava stews that are made with these beans to this day. Examples are Portugal’s cozido, Spain’s fabada; France’s cassoulet, and Italy’s cazzuola. And the Europeans replaced lamb with pork, which is not consumed by the Muslim Arabs, for whom pork is prohibited by God.
In the fifteenth century, Cristóvão Colombo arrived at the Americas and found a legume native to the region, which is called just feijão in Brazil, and this was brought back to Europe, thus substituting fava beans and turning the dish into a stew of beans with meats.
Arrival in Brazil
In the sixteenth century, the stew recipe crossed the Atlantic Ocean with the Portuguese colonizers and arrived in Brazil, this time by the hands of Portuguese women as a white bean and pork stew.
The Portuguese noticed the eating habits of the Indigenous people and discovered another type of beans in Brazil, the black beans, of South American origin. The indigenous people cooked the black beans, then mixed it in a wooden mortar with pepper and herbs, added water, thickened up the stock with cassava flour, thus creating a bean purée or pirão. The Portuguese also noticed the Africans in Brazil eat the Indigenous pirão but added Palm oil, which originates from Africa, and other African spices.
Thus the Portuguese recreated their black bean stew, adding cassava flour and Indigenous and African spices. They introduced rice in Brazil, brought by the Arabs as aroz, which started being pronounced as “arroz” in Portuguese. In Brazil, before the arrival of the Portuguese, there was a native cereal similar to rice that the indigenous Tupi people called abati-uaupé, which literally means husk corn.
This way the stew arrived at a crossroads of miscegenation and ethno-cultural influences of Arabs, Portuguese, Brazilian indigenous peoples and Africans, and so was born one of the various versions of the stew recipe, Brazil’s black bean stew.
Brazilian feijoada
The stew that came from the West, went through Europe and arrived in Brazil adapted to South American black beans and became a black bean stew thickened with pork and accompanied with cassava flour. The Brazilian creativity led it to being called “porção de feijão bem misturada” [well mixed bean serving] and then, feijoada, adding the suffix of “misturada” [mixed].
This feast of Brazilian feijoada started being enjoyed by the elite of the Northeast and spread starting in the nineteenth century, as per the edition of March 3, 1827, of the newspaper Jornal Diario de Pernambuco in one of the first ads for the Brazilian feijoada: [Restaurant] Locanda Águia D’Ouro – an excellent Brazilian feijoada on Thursdays. In Rio de Janeiro, one of the first ads was on the Jornal de Commercio of January 5, 1849, titled The wonderful Brazilian feijoada.
Arab stew in Brazil and lamb feijoada in the Arab world
By another route, the Arab immigration to Brazil, which has taken place since the eighteenth century, the original Arab white bean stew made of lamb and rice also arrived in Brazil by the hands of Arab immigrant women, and now it’s common to find this bean and lamb stew in Brazil, the Yakhné façulia bil-lahmeh kharuf.
In the Arab world, especially in Lebanon, the Brazilebanese (a neologism I created for Lebanese Brazilian dual citizens), also by the hands of Brazilebanese women, created a new variant, the Brazilebanese feijoada with black beans, now planted in Lebanon, lamb, lamb sausage, beef, and semolina flour (as there isn’t cassava crops in Lebanon), fried with eggs, almonds and salt.
Feijoada has also become a hybrid dish, an Eastern, European, Amerindian and African miscenegeation. Each person makes feijoada their own way, as Vinícius de Moraes used to sing in “Feijoada à minha moda.”
* Roberto Khatlab, was born in Maringá, Brazil. The researcher and writer currently lives in Beirut, Lebanon.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
