Feijoada Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Feijoada, often called Brazil's national dish, is a long-simmered stew of black beans and various cuts of pork. It took shape during Brazil's colonial period, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

One of its two main ingredients, the black bean, is a crop long native to South America and a familiar presence on Brazilian tables from early on. The other, pork, came from animals the Portuguese brought across the ocean. The Portuguese reached Brazil in 1500, and the first recorded introduction of pigs dates to 1532, when Martim Afonso de Sousa is said to have brought them from Portugal. Until pigs arrived, a dish that simmers beans and pork together in one pot had no way of coming into being.

Technically, the dish rests on two familiar practices: salting to preserve meat, and long, slow cooking to soften tough beans and humble cuts. No record of the dish has been found from before the nineteenth century. In the northeastern city of Recife in the early nineteenth century, inns advertised feijoada in the newspapers as a Thursday dish.

Popular lore places the dish's birth in the slave kitchen, but the oldest form the records reach is a plate that a city inn served to paying customers at a modest price.

Feijoada carries one widely circulated origin story. An enslaved cook, it is said, took the discarded parts of a slaughtered pig, the ears, feet and tail, and simmered them with black beans, and from this the dish was born. The "scraps" account was widely believed. In a 1982 paper the anthropologist Peter Fry wrote that, like American soul food, feijoada was made by slaves from the pork their masters threw away. By 2005 Fry had revised that view, acknowledging the dish's Portuguese elements.

Yet there is no record of the dish from before the nineteenth century (Fernandes, 2005). According to Rodrigo Elias (2010), the oldest references to feijoada have nothing to do with slaves or slave quarters; they point instead to eateries frequented by the slave-owning urban elite. Both are cited in a 2018 article by Karls and colleagues on feijoada in nineteenth-century Rio de Janeiro. This rebuttal rests on the absence of records, though; no document directly contradicts the slave-origin story.

The earliest record that can be traced is an advertisement printed on 2 March 1827 in the Recife newspaper Diario de Pernambuco by the inn Locanda da Aguia d'ouro. Alongside a daily list of Portuguese dishes, it promised "excellente feijoada à Brazileira" on Thursdays, all at a modest price. The name feijoada was thus in print by 1827 at the latest. That date is the earliest in the Recife paper and other titles held in the University of Florida Digital Collections; the newspapers of Rio are not among them. In 1833 the same paper carried an advertisement for the Hottel Theatre, a modest lodging house, offering Italian-style dishes and, on Thursdays, "feijoada de orilheiras," feijoada made with pig's ears. The ear, so often cast as a slave's scrap, appears here on the menu of a city inn.

Where, then, can the origin be traced? As quoted in the same article by Karls and colleagues, the food historian Luís da Câmara Cascudo, in his História da Alimentação no Brasil, called feijoada "a European solution elaborated in Brazil. Portuguese technique with Brazilian material," and saw it as an adaptation of the Portuguese cozido, a stew of meat and vegetables. The blog Flavors of Brazil goes further, linking feijoada to the pork-and-bean stews of Portugal's Estremadura, Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, and calling it a cousin of the French cassoulet; this has not yet been confirmed in scholarly literature. The researcher Maciel (2004) holds that no single origin can be established.

The Portuguese reached Brazil in 1500, and pigs are recorded as arriving in 1532. Nearly three hundred years later, feijoada surfaces on the Thursday menu of a Recife inn. The tale of the leftover scraps has gone on being told without any record behind it, while the first form the records show is a "Brazilian-style" dish served in a city inn alongside a menu of Portuguese food.