Pernambuco, 1550s–1580s · Denunciações de Pernambuco, 1593

Branca's Adafina

Branca Dias, a New Christian tried in Lisbon in 1543, kept Shabbat in Olinda with a yellow stew of meat and crushed chickpeas. Two women who learned to sew in her house described it to the Inquisition in 1593. This is the stew as they describe it, with the spices her household could get in Brazil at the time.

Branca's yellow panellada

for the Saturday meal SERVES 6 · FRIDAY AFTERNOON TO SATURDAY MIDDAY

“… nos dittos sabbados jantavão sempre huã iguaria que nunca comiam nos outros dias da semana, a qual iguaria era amarella, a qual deziam as dittas suas filhas mais moças que se fazia com grãos pisados, e a carne picada e adubos …”

Joanna Fernandes, 3 November 1593. Denunciações de Pernambuco, p. 31

“… huã panellada de comer a qual ficava cozinhada daquella tarde pera ho dia seguinte … lançavão a carne picada na panella com azeite e cebolla e grãos e adubos e outras cousas, e barravão lhe o testo com massa ao redor e metiamna dentro em hum forno onde estava até se cozer.”

Anna Lins, 10 November 1593. Denunciações de Pernambuco, p. 57

In short: on Saturdays the family ate a yellow dish they ate on no other day, made of crushed chickpeas, chopped meat and spices. Branca's enslaved cook, Felipa, made it one afternoon with olive oil and onion. The lid was sealed with dough and the pot went into an oven until the next day.

Ingredients

  • Beef or mutton, fat trimmed, cut in 1–2 cm pieces; if using leg of lamb or mutton, have the sciatic nerve removed · 1 kg
  • Olive oil · 6 tbsp
  • Onions, sliced · 3
  • Dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked until soft · 300 g
  • Salt
  • Water, just enough to keep it moist · about 400 ml
  • Flour-and-water dough, to seal the lid · 150 g flour

Her adubos, pounded in a mortar

  • Black peppercorns · 1½ tsp
  • Coriander seeds · 1½ tsp
  • Cumin seeds · 1 tsp
  • Fresh ginger, grated · 2 cm
  • Cinnamon stick · 2 cm
  • Whole cloves · 1–2
  • Saffron, optional, steeped in a little hot water · a pinch

Method

  1. Friday afternoon. Pound the spices to a coarse powder and add the ginger.
  2. Heat the oil in a clay pot or heavy casserole. Fry the onions slowly until soft and golden.
  3. Add the meat and brown it. Stir in the spices for a minute.
  4. Crush half the chickpeas to a rough paste and leave the rest whole. Add both, with any saffron and its water, salt and just enough water to keep everything moist.
  5. Put on the lid and press a rope of dough all round the rim to seal it.
  6. Before sundown, put the pot in the oven at 100–110 °C and leave it until Saturday midday, about 16–18 hours. Hers went into a wood oven that cooled through the night.
  7. Saturday midday, break the seal, stir and serve with bread. It should be a thick, golden mash of meat and chickpeas.

Her spices in Brazil

SpiceIn Pernambuco in her time
Black pepper pimentaImported from India through Lisbon and familiar in the colony
Coriander, cumin coentro, cominhosGrown in Brazilian kitchen gardens
Ginger gengibreBrought from São Tomé and grown in large amounts in Bahia by the 1580s
Cinnamon canelaImported; in everyday use in Bahia in 1587
Cloves cravoImported and valued, so used sparingly
Saffron açafrãoPart of the Portuguese spice mix, but imported and costly. No witness names it

How sure is each part

PartEvidence
Chopped meat, olive oil, onion, crushed chickpeas, a spice mix, the yellow colour, the dough seal, the oven, cooking overnight, Saturday onlyNamed by the two witnesses in 1593
Frying the onions in oil firstHow other New Christians in Bahia and Pernambuco made the same dish, according to their servants
Pepper, coriander, cumin, ginger, cinnamon, clovesNo witness names her spices. These are the ones period sources place in Brazil
SaffronUncertain. The onions, oil and crushed chickpeas give a golden colour without it
Garlic, bay leavesNot in her record, so left out. Garlic also grew poorly in the Northeast: in 1587 it didn't form heads in Bahia
CabbageLeft out on purpose. A Bahia witness described a New Christian mixing crushed chickpeas and spices into the meat “sem lhe botar couves”, without cabbage, and said this was what made it a Jewish dish

Variations: full recipes for a maize version, a manioc version and a fuller Sabbath pot follow below the sources.

If olive oil ran out: in 1627 Frei Vicente do Salvador wrote that in Brazil oil was made from coconut palms, “Azeite? faz-se de cocos de palmeiras”. Coconut oil is the period substitute. Never lard: avoiding pork fat was one of the signs the Inquisition looked for.

Not in her pot: pork, lard, rabbit, hare or fish without scales, all listed in the Inquisition’s 1593 edict as foods Judaizers avoided; tomato, potato and paprika, which came into Iberian cooking later, or nutmeg and caraway, which no Brazilian source of her time mentions. Ask your rabbi how your community keeps food hot over Shabbat before making it for Shabbat itself. Quantities and oven temperature are modern; the sources give none.

Sources: Primeira visitação do Santo Officio ás partes do Brasil: Denunciações de Pernambuco 1593–1595 (São Paulo, 1929), pp. xxi, 31, 57, 80, 100, 387; A Drizzle of Honey, p. 312 n. 65 (Clara Fernandes); Confissões da Bahia 1591–92; Gabriel Soares de Sousa, Tratado descriptivo do Brasil em 1587 (São Paulo, 1938), pp. 141–142, 181–203, 208–210; Frei Vicente do Salvador, História do Brasil (1627), as quoted in Brandão (1930 ed.), pp. 289–290; Ambrósio Fernandes Brandão, Diálogos das Grandezas do Brasil (1618; Rio de Janeiro, 1930), pp. 132–133, 194–195, 199; Domingos Rodrigues, Arte de Cozinha (Lisbon, 1680); Luís da Câmara Cascudo, História da Alimentação no Brasil, pp. 212–213; David Gitlitz and Linda Davidson, A Drizzle of Honey (1999), pp. 36, 150, 169; Hélène Jawhara Piñer, Jews, Food, and Spain (2022), pp. 131, 200; Claudia Roden, The Book of Jewish Food (1996), pp. 191, 367.

Variations

Three versions built from what Pernambuco had in the 1580s and 1590s. Each keeps the core of her pot: meat, olive oil, onion, the spices, a sealed lid and an overnight oven. None of the changes is in Branca's record, so call each one a variation.

Maize panellada

half chickpeas, half pounded yellow maize SERVES 6 · SOAK THURSDAY NIGHT · FRIDAY TO SATURDAY MIDDAY

Gabriel Soares de Sousa, writing in Bahia in 1587, describes maize that was white, “almecegada” (pale yellow), black or red. He adds that “o mesmo milho quebrado e pizado na pilão é bom para se cozer com caldo de carne”: broken and pounded in a mortar, it is good cooked in meat broth. Yellow maize makes the pot thicker and more golden.

Ingredients

  • Beef or mutton, fat trimmed, in 1–2 cm pieces · 1 kg
  • Olive oil · 6 tbsp
  • Onions, sliced · 3
  • Dried chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked until soft · 150 g
  • Dried yellow maize, broken (Brazilian xerém or milho para canjica amarelo), soaked overnight · 150 g
  • Her adubos, as in the main recipe
  • Salt
  • Water · about 700 ml
  • Flour-and-water dough, to seal · 150 g flour

Method

  1. Friday morning. Drain the maize, cover with fresh water and simmer until tender, 45–60 minutes. Drain it and pound it roughly in a mortar, as Soares describes.
  2. Pound the spices and add the ginger.
  3. Fry the onions slowly in the oil until golden. Brown the meat and stir in the spices for a minute.
  4. Crush half the chickpeas. Add all the chickpeas, the pounded maize, any saffron, salt and the water. The maize drinks more liquid than chickpeas, so it needs more water than the main recipe.
  5. Seal the lid with a rope of dough.
  6. Before sundown, put it in the oven at 100–110 °C until Saturday midday.
  7. Break the seal and stir. It should be a thick, golden porridge of meat, maize and chickpeas.

Manioc panellada

sealed with tapioca, served with beiju, and farinha if you like SERVES 6 · CARIMÃ FROM EARLY IN THE WEEK · FRIDAY TO SATURDAY MIDDAY

In Pernambuco, manioc was the everyday bread. In 1593 a witness told the Inquisition that tapiocas were “ho mantimento comum desta terra em lugar de pães”, the common food of this land in place of bread (Denunciações, p. 80). Gabriel Soares de Sousa describes how it was made in 1587 (Tratado, chs. 38–42, pp. 189–195). The stew is the main recipe; the seal and what you serve with it change.

Safety first. The manioc of Branca's time was mostly bitter manioc, whose raw juice Soares calls “terrivel peçonha”, terrible poison. Grating, squeezing, soaking and toasting remove it. At home, buy tapioca starch (polvilho doce), hydrated tapioca (goma de tapioca) and farinha de mandioca, or use sweet cassava (aipim, macaxeira), which Soares says was used “para beijús e para farinha fresca”. Never eat cassava raw.

How it was done in 1587

ProductWhat Soares describes
FarinhaRoots peeled with oyster shells “até ficarem alvissimas”, grated on a stone, squeezed dry in a palm-fibre press (tapeti), sieved and toasted in an earthenware pan, stirred “como quem faz confeitos”. It comes out “como cuscuz, mas mais branca”. The well-off ate it “sempre fresca e quente” (pp. 189, 191–192)
BeijuThe same squeezed mass spread in the hot pan “tão delgadas como filhós mouriscas”, as even “como obreas”, cooked “até que ficam muito seccas e torradas”. The food of “gente de primor”, invented by Portuguese women (pp. 189–190)
CarimãRoots soaked until the skin loosens, dried hard over the fire on a raised rack, scraped white, pounded and sifted “tão delgado e mimoso como de farinha muito boa”. Used for bread and cakes “em lugar da farinha de trigo” (pp. 192–195)
Farinha de guerraCarimã toasted with fresh grated manioc until very dry. It kept for a year, and soaked in meat broth was “tão saborosa como cuscuz” (pp. 194–195)

The stew

  • Everything in the main recipe except the wheat dough

Tapioca seal

  • Tapioca starch (polvilho doce), or carimã · 150 g
  • Boiling water · about 80 ml
  • Cold water, as needed

Beijus (makes 8)

  • Hydrated tapioca (goma de tapioca) · 300 g

Toasted farinha, optional

  • Farinha de mandioca, coarse · 200 g

Carimã, optional (makes about 250 g)

  • Sweet cassava (aipim) · 1 kg
  • Or buy massa or farinha de carimã, sold in Northeast Brazil

Method

  1. Carimã, from Monday or Tuesday. Peel the cassava, cut out the woody core and cut it in chunks. Soak it in water for 3–4 days, changing the water daily, until soft and lightly sour. Drain, mash and squeeze it hard in a cloth. Spread it thin and dry it in the oven at 70–80 °C for 4–6 hours, until hard. Grind and sift fine.
  2. Friday morning, beijus. Rub the hydrated tapioca through a sieve until it is like fine damp sand. Sift a thin layer, about 20 cm across, into a dry pan over medium-low heat. When it sets into a disc, after about a minute, flip it. For Soares's dry, toasted kind, keep turning it over low heat until both sides are crisp and pale gold, 4–5 minutes. Cool on a rack; they keep for days.
  3. Friday morning, farinha (optional). Stir the farinha in a dry pan over medium heat for 5–8 minutes, until it smells toasty and turns pale gold. This is plain toasted flour, not farofa, which is fried in fat.
  4. Friday afternoon, the stew. Fry the onions slowly in the olive oil, brown the meat and stir in the adubos. Add the chickpeas, half of them crushed, any saffron, salt and about 400 ml water.
  5. The seal. Pour the boiling water over the tapioca starch or carimã and stir: scalding makes it hold together. Knead in cold water a spoonful at a time until it is soft and pliable, like play dough. Roll it into a rope, press it round the rim and press the lid down onto it.
  6. Before sundown, put the pot in the oven at 100–110 °C. The starch seal sets hard and pale.
  7. Saturday midday, crack the seal off with a knife. Serve the stew with the beijus, as bread or as a spoon. If you made farinha, put it on the table for everyone to spoon over the stew so it soaks up the juices, as Soares describes, or stir a ladle of hot broth into a bowl of it for a soft, couscous-like mash.

Keep it dairy-free. Soares's carimã bread and cakes were made “com leite e gemmas de ovos”. Milk with a meat stew breaks kosher rules, and a household keeping Jewish law in secret would have avoided it. Anything made with carimã for this table should use only water, olive oil and eggs.

A fuller Sabbath pot

with chicken, eggs and greens SERVES 8–10 · FRIDAY AFTERNOON TO SATURDAY MIDDAY

Other pots of the time held more than Branca's witnesses mention. Beatriz Mendes, another New Christian in Pernambuco, cooked chicken “na panella com azeite e com huã pequenina de cebolla” (Denunciações, p. 387). Whole eggs cooked overnight appear in Spanish trials and in every Sephardic dafina (Roden, p. 368). A Toledo household in the 1470s covered its pot for the night with chopped, crushed chard (Piñer, Jews, Food, and Spain, p. 200). Turnips and chard both grew in Bahia (Soares, p. 184; Brandão, p. 199).

Ingredients

  • Everything in the main recipe, with water increased · to about 700 ml
  • Chicken thighs and drumsticks, skin on · 1 kg
  • Eggs, in their shells, washed · 6
  • Turnips, peeled and quartered · 3 medium
  • Chard, leaves chopped · 1 bunch
  • Fresh coriander or mint, to finish

Method

  1. Make the main recipe up to adding the chickpeas, browning the chicken after the beef or mutton.
  2. Add the chickpeas, whole and crushed, the turnips, spices, salt and the larger amount of water. Use a large pot: this one needs about 6 litres.
  3. Nestle the eggs in among the meat.
  4. Lay the chopped chard over the top as a green lid, as the Toledo household did, then put on the pot lid and seal it with dough.
  5. Before sundown, put it in the oven at 100–110 °C until Saturday midday.
  6. Break the seal. Lift out the eggs and peel them: the whites will be light brown and the yolks creamy. Serve the meat, chicken, chickpeas and turnips with the eggs and the chard, scattered with coriander or mint.