Feijoada

Feijoada belongs to a wide family of European bean-and-meat stews, and closely related dishes are found in Portugal and across the Iberian Peninsula, where beans are simmered with assorted cuts of pork and sausage.

A popular account holds that the dish was created by enslaved people from cuts discarded by plantation owners. Historians have pushed back on this considerably: bean stews with pork were already established in Portugal, offcuts such as ears and trotters were valued rather than discarded in European cooking, and the earliest Brazilian references describe it as food eaten across society. The dish's real history is one of adaptation of an Iberian tradition to Brazilian ingredients, in a country whose foodways were profoundly shaped by African, Indigenous and Portuguese influences together.

In its modern form it is unmistakably Brazilian, built on black beans and served with a set of accompaniments found nowhere in Europe.

The base is black beans, soaked and then simmered for hours with a range of salted and smoked pork: ribs, sausage, smoked loin, and traditionally the cheaper cuts including ear, tail and trotter, which supply gelatine and give the broth its body. Salted meats are soaked or blanched first to control the salt.

The seasoning is restrained — garlic, onion, bay leaf — because the meats provide most of the flavour. The finished stew should be thick and dark, with the beans breaking down enough to thicken the liquid naturally.

Feijoada is never served alone. The standard accompaniments are white rice, farofa (toasted cassava flour, which soaks up the broth and adds crunch), sautéed collard greens cut into fine ribbons, and orange slices, whose acidity cuts through the richness. A caipirinha is the customary drink.

It is traditionally eaten at lunchtime on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and it is emphatically a social meal: heavy, slow, and followed by an afternoon in which nobody expects to accomplish very much. Restaurants across Brazil still organise their week around it.