46 Fun Facts About Brazilian Food

Which bean-and-meat stew is considered Brazil's national dish?

Feijoada: legend says enslaved cooks invented it from discarded pork cuts, but food historians trace the stew to Portugal's bean-and-meat dishes, remade in Brazil with native black beans.

What is Brazil's national cocktail?

Caipirinha: Brazilian law protects the recipe. A federal decree reserves the name for cachaça mixed with lime and sugar, and the same drink made with vodka is called a caipiroska.

Cachaça, Brazil's native liquor, is distilled from what?

Fermented cane juice, not the molasses used for most rum, is what cachaça is distilled from; even so, US labels had to call it rum until a 2013 rule recognised cachaça as a distinct Brazilian product.

Brigadeiros are chocolate truffles made from cocoa powder, butter and what?

Condensed milk, cooked with cocoa and butter until fudgy. Supporters of Brigadier Eduardo Gomes made and sold the sweets at his 1945 presidential rallies; he lost, but the candy kept his rank as its name.

Which grape-like Brazilian fruit grows straight out of the trunk of its tree?

Jabuticaba: once picked the berries start to ferment within days, so fresh ones rarely reach markets far from where they grow, and the fruit is often made into jam, wine or liqueur.

Kibe and esfiha, now staples of Brazilian snack bars, arrived with immigrants from which two countries?

Lebanon and Syria: immigrants who came from the late 1800s made the snacks everyday Brazilian food, yet Habib's, the fast-food chain built on cheap esfihas, was founded by a man born in Portugal with no Arab roots.

Pão de queijo originated in which Brazilian state?

Minas Gerais: wheat was scarce in colonial Brazil, so cooks there baked with cassava starch instead, which is why pão de queijo is naturally gluten-free.

Coxinha, the teardrop-shaped chicken croquette, literally means what?

Coxinha means 'little thigh' (coxa is thigh); the dough is shaped like a drumstick, and legend ties it to a son of Princess Isabel who would eat only that cut.

Moqueca is a Brazilian stew built around what?

Fish or shrimp: the stew is often traced to an Indigenous way of cooking fish wrapped in leaves over a fire, though today it simmers with tomato, onion and coriander in a clay pot.

Espírito Santo's moqueca skips Bahia's dendê oil and gets its colour from which spice?

Annatto: capixaba cooks tint olive oil with the seeds, called urucum, and leave out the palm oil and coconut milk that African cooking brought to Bahia's version, so theirs is the lighter stew.

Which purple Amazon palm fruit is eaten unsweetened in Pará with fish and manioc flour?

Açaí: along the Amazon it is a savoury staple, mashed into a thick pulp and eaten with fish; the sweet frozen bowl with granola and banana is the southern version that took off in Rio.

Which Amazon fruit, first domesticated by the Sateré-Mawé, splits open to look like an eyeball?

Guaraná: in the Sateré-Mawé myth the first plant grew from the buried eye of a dead child, and today its seeds go into Brazil's soft drinks and into energy drinks around the world.

Picanha, the prized cut of Brazilian barbecue, is known in the UK as what?

Rump cap: the cut was long overlooked as just part of the rump, and the steakhouse owner Fuad Zegaib, of Dinho's, claimed to be the first to put it on the grill by itself.

Traditional churrasco picanha is seasoned with just what?

Coarse sea salt: purists put nothing else on the cut, and they leave the thick layer of fat on so that it keeps the beef moist as it roasts over charcoal.

In which Brazilian steakhouse service style do waiters circulate with skewers of meat for one fixed price?

Rodízio: in one origin story, a roadside steakhouse owner in the 1960s calmed a room of impatient diners by sending every skewer round to every table, and the habit stuck.

Pudim de leite, a staple Brazilian dessert, is a version of which classic?

Crème caramel: Brazil's version grew out of Portuguese flan and is baked in a water bath, chilled and flipped so the caramel runs down; even its name is borrowed, from the English word pudding.

Farofa, a staple side at Brazilian barbecues, is what?

Toasted manioc meal: the coarse flour is fried in butter or oil with bacon, onion or olives for crunch, and it gave Brazil the word farofeiro, a day-tripper who brings a packed lunch to the beach.

Which creamy Bahian paste blends bread or ground nuts with dried shrimp, coconut milk and dendê oil?

Vatapá: enslaved West Africans brought the dish to Bahia, where it is still prepared as a ritual food for Candomblé ceremonies as well as ladled out at street stalls.

Acarajé, the Bahian street snack, is a fried ball of which legume?

Black-eyed peas: the fritter is West Africa's akara, and its Brazilian name is Yoruba too, akara plus the word for 'eat'; in Bahia it is both a Candomblé offering and a street snack.

Which Bahian spread of okra, dried shrimp and nuts in palm oil goes inside acarajé?

Caruru: the stew is thought to descend from West African okra soups, okra itself being an African plant; in Bahia it is simmered down with the shrimp and nuts until thick enough to spread.

Pastéis are believed to have evolved from which dish adapted by Asian immigrants?

Fried spring rolls: Chinese immigrants are credited with adapting them, and Japanese newcomers, some opening stalls to pass as Chinese during the Second World War, carried the pastel to markets everywhere.

Which drink is the classic partner to a pastel at a Brazilian street market?

Caldo de cana, fresh-pressed sugarcane juice, is the classic match; a market pastel is such a ritual that Brazilians call campaign time 'pastel season', after the politicians photographed eating one.

The dessert Romeu e Julieta pairs cheese with a paste made from which fruit?

Guava: settlers are said to have used guava paste in place of Portugal's quince paste, and the name arrived only in the 1960s, from an advert that dressed comic-strip kids Mônica and Cebolinha as the lovers.

Quindim is a glistening yellow custard of sugar, egg yolks and what?

Ground coconut: the Portuguese sweet it descends from was made with almonds, and enslaved cooks in colonial Bahia are thought to have swapped in the coconut that grew all around them.

Brazil's estrogonofe, a home favourite adapted from a Russian dish, is served over rice and topped with what?

Potato sticks, called batata palha: Brazilian cooks also swapped the Russian recipe's sour cream for table cream and stirred in ketchup, and they often use chicken in place of the beef.

Pamonha, a festa junina staple, is a sweet or savoury paste boiled inside what?

Corn husks: the grated-corn paste is tied up in its own husks and boiled, and loudspeaker cars sell it street by street to a recorded 1970s jingle for the 'delicious pamonhas of Piracicaba'.

Pinhão, boiled and eaten in southern Brazil's winter, is the nut of which tree?

Araucaria: the endangered Paraná pine owes many of its seedlings to the azure jay, which wedges the seeds into the ground as a food store, the perfect start for a new tree.

What stops pequi eaters biting into the fruit's stone?

Tiny spines: they lodge in the gums and palate and are hard to pull out, so the pungent yellow pulp is scraped off gently with the teeth; a few wild trees bear spineless stones.

Chimarrão, the drink associated with the gaúcho, is made from what?

Yerba mate: chimarrão comes from Spanish cimarrón, 'wild', a word that also names cattle gone feral; it stuck to mate drunk bitter, with no sugar, from a gourd through a metal straw.

Pato no tucupi, Pará's famous duck dish, is the traditional lunch of which October procession in Belém?

Círio de Nazaré: one of the world's largest religious gatherings fills Belém on the second Sunday of October, and families then sit down to the duck, simmered in tucupi and topped with jambu.

Tucupi, the yellow Amazonian broth pressed from wild manioc, must be boiled before use to drive off which poison?

Cyanide: raw wild manioc juice releases hydrocyanic acid, so the liquid is left to settle, then boiled and fermented before it becomes the sour yellow sauce of Pará's duck and shrimp dishes.

Barreado, Paraná's beef stew slow-cooked in a clay pot sealed with flour paste, has a name that means what?

Muddied: barreado comes from barrear, to daub with clay. The lid is sealed with a flour-and-water paste to trap the steam, and the beef cooks for the best part of a day until it falls apart.

Catupiry, a creamy cheese spread loved across Brazil, was created in 1911 by an immigrant couple from which country?

Italy: Mário Silvestrini and his wife began making it in a small factory, pizzerias later made it a standard topping, and the brand name became Brazil's everyday word for any thick creamy cheese.

Queijo coalho is typically eaten how on Brazilian beaches?

Grilled on skewers: beach vendors in the Northeast grill it to order, often with a dusting of oregano, because this firm, squeaky cheese stands up to the heat and browns without melting off the stick.

The loaded Brazilian burger known as 'X-Tudo' literally translates as what?

Cheese-everything: Brazilians say the letter X as 'sheess', so snack bars write it as shorthand for cheese, and this burger piles on egg, ham, bacon, corn and more.

Brazil's national cocktail is believed to have been invented in the countryside of which state?

São Paulo: the town of Piracicaba claims the drink, and one account has it begin as a 1918 flu remedy of cachaça, lime, garlic and honey; Rio listed it as part of its own heritage in 2019 all the same.

Paçoca, the crumbly sweet of Brazil's June festivals, is made from which nut?

Peanuts: the name is Tupi for something crumbled, and it first belonged to a savoury travel food of dried beef pounded in a mortar; the sweet version swaps in roasted peanuts and sugar.

Suco de maracujá, a tart yellow Brazilian juice, is made from which fruit?

Passion fruit: maracujá is its Tupi name, while the English one came from Christian missionaries, who read the flower as a picture of Christ's Passion, with its fringe as the crown of thorns.

Which everyday Brazilian nickname for cachaça literally means 'a drop'?

Pinga: the word means a drop, from pingar, to drip, and it is one of the many nicknames cachaça answers to, which run from água-benta, 'holy water', to marvada, 'the wicked one'.

Tutu de feijão is a Brazilian dish of puréed beans thickened with what?

Manioc or corn flour: the paste is then fried up with bacon, onion and garlic. In Brazil tutu is also the bogeyman used to scare children, a word that dictionaries trace to Kimbundu, an Angolan language.

Virado à paulista, São Paulo's signature plate, is built around which meat?

Pork chop: the name virado, 'turned', is said to come from colonial expeditions whose beans, flour and meat got shaken together in their packs; the city's lunch counters still serve the plate every Monday.

Rio's garlic-smothered steak, filé à Osvaldo Aranha, is named after a regular customer who was what?

A diplomat: Oswaldo Aranha, who presided over the UN General Assembly in 1947, ordered the same garlic-smothered fillet so often at Rio's Cosmopolita, a politicians' haunt, that the dish took his name.

Bolinhos de bacalhau, a Rio street food of Portuguese origin, are fritters of which fish?

Cod: bacalhau is Portuguese for the fish and, in the kitchen, for its dried salted form, so prized in Portugal that it is said to have a recipe for every day of the year; the fritter is one that Brazil kept.

At New Year's Eve, Brazilians traditionally swap the daily beans for which legume?

Lentils: the small flat seeds are said to look like coins, so eating them as the year turns is meant to bring money in the twelve months ahead.

Which fruit is served in slices beside Brazil's national bean-and-pork stew to cut its richness?

Orange: the slices are said to help the heavy stew go down, one part of a full spread with rice, greens and farofa that many restaurants keep for Wednesdays and Saturdays.

The clay pots used for Espírito Santo's moqueca are dyed with the bark of which coastal tree?

Mangrove: the women potters of Goiabeiras, in Vitória, shape each pot by hand, fire it in the open air and coat it with a dye made from the bark; Brazil lists their craft as national heritage.