Moqueca capixaba Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Where it came from, and from what

Moqueca capixaba is a seafood stew carried down along the coast of Espírito Santo, in southeastern Brazil. White fish and shellfish are simmered slowly in a shallow, lidded pot with tomato, onion and aromatic vegetables. The result is a clear, reddish broth—quite unlike the thick, opaque moqueca of Bahia that shares its name, in both look and taste.

At the heart of the dish is the earthenware pot, the panela de barro. In the Goiabeiras district near the state capital, Vitória, women potters still shape riverbank clay by hand and finish it in an open firing. The indigenous peoples of Espírito Santo left pottery that archaeologists date back some twelve hundred to twenty-five hundred years, and cooking fish in such a pot was a deeply rooted local practice. The naturalist Auguste de Saint-Hilaire noted these shallow earthenware pans near Goiabeiras in 1815. The fish, the shellfish and the tomato that fill the capixaba moqueca all came from the local sea and fields to begin with; what drew them together into a single dish was the slow braising done in this pot. It was with this cooking—continuous with the indigenous technique of wrapping fish in leaves and roasting it over embers—that the capixaba moqueca as we know it took shape.

Its colour and flavour come from annatto (urucum) and olive oil. Annatto is a plant native to South America whose red seeds yield a vivid pigment, long used by indigenous peoples to dye bodies and food. Its wild form grows in Amazonia, and its name traces back to a Tupi word for red. The broth's reddish tint comes from this seed—a different source from the red of the Bahian version, which comes from the oil-palm's dendê. Olive oil, by contrast, is a Mediterranean product that the Portuguese brought in by sea during the colonial period. From the sixteenth century onward, olive oil carried across the Atlantic entered the kitchens of this state and was layered into the local seafood stew.

In this way moqueca capixaba took root as a dish built on an old foundation—the indigenous earthenware pot and native annatto—with Portuguese-brought olive oil laid over it. It uses no African-derived dendê oil and no coconut milk. In 2002 the craft of the earthenware pot was registered as Brazil's first item of intangible cultural heritage—a year that marks its recognition as heritage, not the year the dish itself was born.

Say moqueca and most people picture the rich Bahian dish, thick with dendê oil and coconut milk. Yet under the same name there is a wholly different stew in Espírito Santo. Locally, one sometimes hears that this capixaba version is the true, original moqueca as it was before it took on an African cast—older, the story goes, than the Bahian one.

Follow the sources, though, and the neat scheme of "which is the original and which the offshoot" finds no support. At the root lay an old practice: indigenous people simmering fish in an earthenware pot. Onto that same foundation, Bahia added the dendê oil and coconut milk that had crossed over from Africa, while Espírito Santo took up the olive oil the Portuguese brought and the native South American annatto. One and the same stew branched into two styles, each absorbing the oil and colouring within local reach—not one the ancient prototype of the other, but sister forms sprung from a common ancestor.

That the annatto colouring the capixaba version is a native New World plant appears in one of the earliest Portuguese records. In 1500, Pero Vaz de Caminha, in his letter to the king, described the Tupiniquim people dyeing their bodies red. That red was urucum—already of this land in the very first year Europeans stood on the Brazilian shore. Both the seed that gives the colour and the pot it is cooked in were here far longer than the oil that came from abroad.

That the capixaba version is no mere regional oddity is told by the pot itself. The Goiabeiras earthenware craft was the first intangible cultural heritage Brazil ever registered, and without this pot, moqueca capixaba is said not to hold together.