COOKING IS ONE WOMAN’S CONNECTION TO HER BRAZILIAN HOMELAND.
Gabi Lustosa is a busy woman. She arrived on a rainy Saturday 1½ hours late for our cooking session, coming straight from a school meeting with her 7-year-old son that ran too long.
Lustosa is a Brazilian single mom in El Cerrito who runs her own day care, and is active in politics and her community. She has a fiance, and barely has time to cook a pot of feijoada (feyzhoo-AH-dah), the slow-cooked black bean stew that is the national dish of Brazil. That’s why feijoada is considered a Saturday dish; it takes so long to make that restaurants in Brazil serve it only on Saturdays.
But on this afternoon, she found a way to make it all work, because cooking is a way for her to stay connected with her hometown of Rio De Janeiro.
“It fills up my heart,” she says. “The smell and taste takes me back home. It means that my Brazilian woman is still alive.” And then she adds: “But first, we need to start with drinking.”
While Lustosa muddled fresh lime halves with sugar for caipirinhas — the national cocktail of Brazil, natch — she spoke about her feijoada carioca, the version native to Rio De Janeiro. “It’s a dish that is hundreds of years old, traditionally slave food,” she says (although some scholars argue that slaves were making it for their masters, not themselves).
“It’s made with odd bits of beef and pork, some salted or smoked, but it’s a flexible recipe,” she continues. For example, Lustosa didn’t have time to find carne seca, a dried beef from Brazil, so hers was more porkcentered, with regular and smoked pork chops, linguica and Italian sausage.
As she sweated onions and an impressive amount of garlic in a pot with oil, Lustosa explains that feijoada has been a balm for her homesickness. She had originally planned to become a science teacher in Rio. She was 22 and in the middle of college when she met a handsome, older American man at Carnival. She could communicate with him only through her friends, who spoke English. But after one week together and many long phone calls aided by a large English-to-Portuguese dictionary, she fell in love and made plans to spend six months
with him in the United States.
Her mom was not happy. “(She) was freaking out, yelling about me finishing college, and how he was trying to buy her daughter with a plane ticket, which wasn’t true,” she says. Lustosa finally calmed her down by asking her for cooking lessons. “I’m going to live by myself for the first time, so teach me something useful, like how to make beans.”
Her mom did teach her how to cook beans, a Brazilian staple, and here in the kitchen, she uses them to help thicken the feijoada sauce.
Lustosa was 23 when she moved to the United States, away from her family and friends. Feijoada was the first meal she cooked after arriving in Chico in 2003, a meal she made for her American boyfriend (the same one from Carnival) and his friends. At that time, she was not yet fluent in English, and even today, she remembers how overwhelming it was to try and speak English with so many people at once: “I didn’t know much, so it gave me a headache.”
No feijoada (or any Brazilian meal, really) is complete without farofa, a side dish of toasted cassava flour. But with limited Internet access, finding ingredients was hard. Some Latin American stores carried Brazilian ingredients, but not farinha de mandioca (cassava flour). So for that first dinner party, she substituted store-bought breadcrumbs. Today, she gets her farinha from Bossa Nova Brazil, a Brazilian grocery store in El Cerrito, and uses bacon fat to toast it. “It’s amazing how much the right ingredients can mean,” she says.
“I remember when I found leite condensado (sweetened condensed milk), I cried. I could
make my son brigadeiros for his birthday.” Brigadeiros are a Brazilian birthday tradition for kids, chocolate candies typically eaten after cake.
Back in the kitchen, the feijoada meat goes into the pot. Over the noise of sizzling fat, Lustosa explains how she eventually got married and spent a year and a half in the U.S., before going back to Rio with her husband to finish her degree. They returned to live in Oakland in 2009, had a son in 2010, and split two years later.
She knew the Brazilian population in the Bay Area was significant, but because of her political affiliation (she was a member of the Workers Party in Brazil), the self-described revolutionary found that it took a while to form her own community. Food was the easy part: She had a good Brazilian grocery store and plenty of Brazilian restaurants to try; anything she couldn’t get was shipped from Brazil by friends and family.
She met Brazilian friends through BrasArte, a dance studio that serves as a community center for local Brazilians to host parties for Brazilian holidays and the World Cup. Through another friend, she was introduced to Coletivo Desbordar, a feminist, antiracist, anti-capitalist group of Brazilian immigrants in the Bay Area. She had found her people.
The group organizes action with others around the world to fight for Brazilian politics (which has had its share of controversy recently), but this year, its focus has shifted to educating immigrants on their rights. Most of the available information is in Spanish, so much work involves translating to Portuguese: “It’s nice to be able to cry or laugh in Portuguese,” Lustosa says.
A few hours after we started, we sat down to a very Rio meal: white rice with feijoada cariocas served with plenty of farofa (“Use a lot to help soak up the liquid”), couve a mineira (garlicky Brazilian greens, made from kale), hot sauce and slices of orange to refresh the palate. Brazilians love their carbs, Lustosa says, and this meal delivers. The stew is rich and layered, creamy from the black beans, smoky yet utterly full of umami thanks to many variations of pork. It’s a dish that fills you up quickly, but you can’t stop eating it.
Near the end, Lustosa pauses: “I know this was a good meal because I feel like calling my mom and telling her how much I miss her.”