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 manioc version, a maize version, a fuller Sabbath pot, a Sabbath empanada and crunchy tapioca-starch mini-pies follow below the sources, with the ways the sources describe sealing a pot and keeping it hot.

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

Five versions built from what Pernambuco had in the 1580s and 1590s, or from other converso kitchens of the time. The first three keep the core of her pot: meat, olive oil, onion, the spices, a sealed lid and an overnight oven. The empanada and the mini-pies put the same ingredients in Sabbath pastry. None of the changes is in Branca's record, so call each one a variation.

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.

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.

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.

Sabbath empanada

chopped meat fried in olive oil, baked in a pie SERVES 6–8 · BAKE FRIDAY · EAT SATURDAY AT ROOM TEMPERATURE

Pies were a Sabbath food for Iberian conversos. In Aranda in 1488 a woman was accused of making “fish pies on Friday for the Sabbath” (A Drizzle of Honey, p. 232). In Almazán around 1505 a witness said the household “carne picada frita en aseyte … fazian vnas enpanadas”, made pies of chopped meat fried in oil (p. 315 n. 12). That is close to Branca's chopped meat and olive oil. The Talmud's pashtida was a pie eaten on Shabbat because it could be baked on Friday and eaten at room temperature (Piñer, Sephardi, p. 30). Branca's own dish was a sealed pot, not a pie, so this is a variation.

Dough

  • Plain wheat flour · 500 g
  • Olive oil, never lard · 120 ml
  • Warm water · about 200 ml
  • Salt · 1 tsp

Filling

  • Beef or mutton, fat trimmed, chopped fine with a knife · 700 g
  • Onions, finely chopped · 2
  • Olive oil · 4 tbsp
  • Her adubos: black pepper 1 tsp, coriander seed 1 tsp, cumin ½ tsp, grated ginger 1 cm, a pinch of cinnamon
  • Cooked chickpeas, roughly crushed, optional · 150 g
  • Saffron, optional, steeped in 2 tbsp hot water · a pinch
  • Salt

Method

  1. Friday morning, the dough. Mix the flour and salt, work in the olive oil, then add warm water until you have a smooth, soft dough. Knead 5 minutes, cover and rest 30 minutes.
  2. The filling. Fry the onions slowly in the oil until golden. Add the meat and fry over high heat until browned and the juices have cooked away. Stir in the spices, any saffron and its water, the crushed chickpeas if using, and salt. Cook 5 more minutes and let it cool completely.
  3. Shape. Heat the oven to 180 °C. Roll out two-thirds of the dough and line a 24 cm pie dish. Add the cold filling. Roll out the rest for a lid, lay it on and crimp the edges tight to seal. Cut a small vent in the top.
  4. Bake for 45–50 minutes, until golden. For small empanadas instead, cut 12 cm circles, fill, fold, crimp and bake 25–30 minutes.
  5. Before sundown, let it cool, then cover it. Eat it on Saturday at room temperature, as a pashtida was eaten.

Crunchy Sabbath mini-pies

wheat and tapioca-starch pastry, filled with chopped meat fried in olive oil MAKES ABOUT 20 · BAKE FRIDAY AFTERNOON · EAT SATURDAY

Our own creation, not a period recipe, built from documented pieces. The conversos of Almazán made pies of “carne picada frita en aseyte”, chopped meat fried in oil (A Drizzle of Honey, p. 315 n. 12). In Pernambuco, the Portuguese used carimã for “muito bom pão, e bolos … mil invenções de beilhós”, very good bread, cakes and a thousand kinds of fritters, “em lugar da farinha de trigo”, instead of wheat flour (Soares, p. 195). Here tapioca starch goes into the pastry with the wheat: scalded with hot olive oil, it makes the crust light and crunchy, like a Brazilian biscoito de polvilho. No witness mentions anything like this in Branca's house.

Pastry

  • Sour tapioca starch (polvilho azedo), or sweet (polvilho doce) · 150 g
  • Olive oil · 100 ml
  • Water · 100 ml
  • Salt · 1 tsp
  • Plain wheat flour · 150 g
  • Egg · 1

Filling

  • Beef or mutton, fat trimmed, chopped fine with a knife · 400 g
  • Onion, finely chopped · 1 large
  • Olive oil · 2 tbsp
  • Her adubos: black pepper ½ tsp, coriander seed ½ tsp, cumin ¼ tsp, grated ginger 1 cm, a pinch of cinnamon
  • Cooked chickpeas, crushed · 80 g
  • Saffron, optional, steeped in 1 tbsp hot water · a pinch
  • Salt

To glaze

  • Egg yolk, beaten with 1 tsp water · 1

Method

  1. The filling. Fry the onion slowly in the oil until golden. Add the meat and fry over high heat until browned and the juices have cooked away. Stir in the spices, the crushed chickpeas, any saffron, and salt. Cook 3 more minutes: the filling should be dry, so it doesn't soften the pastry. Let it cool completely.
  2. The pastry. Put the tapioca starch and salt in a bowl. Bring the olive oil and water to the boil together and pour them over the starch in one go, stirring with a spoon: it will scald into a paste. When it's cool enough to touch, add the wheat flour and the egg and knead until smooth, soft and not sticky. If it's dry, add water a spoonful at a time; if it sticks, a little more flour. Cover and rest 15 minutes.
  3. Shape. Heat the oven to 190 °C. Roll the pastry thin, 2–3 mm, between two sheets of baking paper. Line 6–7 cm tartlet tins (or mini-muffin tins), fill them and cover each with a disc of pastry, pinching the edges. Or cut 9 cm circles, fill, fold into half-moons and seal the edges with a fork. Prick a small hole in the top.
  4. Bake 25–30 minutes, brushing with the yolk halfway through, until deep golden and firm to the touch.
  5. Before sundown, unmould them and cool on a rack so the bottoms stay crisp. Keep them uncovered or under a cloth, never in a closed box, where steam softens the crust. Eat on Saturday at room temperature; they are crunchiest on the day they are baked.

Sour or sweet tapioca starch? Sour starch, fermented like carimã, gives a lighter, crunchier, slightly tangy crust. Sweet starch gives a smoother, firmer one. Both work. Dairy-free: the pastry uses only olive oil, water and egg, so it can go on a table with meat.

Breads of the land

In Pernambuco the everyday bread was made from manioc. Soares (1587) and Brandão (1618) describe how, but give no quantities: no measured recipe for manioc or puba bread survives from the period. These two breads follow their descriptions, with our own measurements. We looked for measured recipes in Brazil's first cookbooks. The Cozinheiro Nacional (Rio de Janeiro, Garnier, 1870s) has no manioc or puba bread; it uses tapioca starch (polvilho) to thicken sauces and in pastry such as “pasteis de capa de fubá à brazileira”, whose dough takes “uma colherzinha de polvilho fervido n'uma chicara d'agua”, a small spoon of starch boiled in a cup of water (ch. XVI, no. 47). The Cozinheiro Imperial (1840) has not been checked yet.

Carimã bread

fermented manioc in place of wheat, without milk MAKES 8 SMALL LOAVES · CARIMÃ EARLY IN THE WEEK · BAKE FRIDAY

Soares: “Desta carimá e pó della bem peneirado fazem os Portuguezes muito bom pão, e bolos amassados com leite e gemmas de ovos”, from well-sifted carimã the Portuguese make very good bread, and cakes kneaded with milk and egg yolks, “em lugar da farinha de trigo”, instead of wheat flour. Women preferred carimã to the stale flour shipped from Portugal, “que é alvissima e lavra-se melhor”, because it is very white and works better (Tratado, p. 195). Brandão explains the name: manioc left in water until soft “se chama mandioca puba”; dried in the smokehouse, “se chama carimá” (Diálogos, p. 178). So carimã bread is bread of dried puba. Here the milk comes out so the bread can go on the table with the meat stew; the yolks stay.

Dough

  • Carimã, made as in the manioc panellada above or bought, finely sifted · 250 g
  • Salt · 1 tsp
  • Water · 120 ml
  • Olive oil · 60 ml
  • Egg yolks · 3
  • Cold water, as needed

If you have no carimã

  • Massa puba (fresh fermented manioc mass), squeezed hard in a cloth · 400 g, in place of the carimã and water; add only the oil, yolks and salt
  • Or fine gari (West African fermented cassava meal), ground and sifted · 250 g
  • Or sour tapioca starch (polvilho azedo) · 200 g with fine farinha de mandioca · 50 g. It puffs up hollow, like a cheeseless pão de queijo; it's the furthest from the original

Method

  1. The carimã, if you're making it: start on Monday or Tuesday, as in the manioc panellada (step 1).
  2. Friday morning, the dough. Mix the carimã and salt in a bowl. Bring the water and olive oil to the boil together and pour over the carimã, stirring with a spoon. Soares doesn't say how the dough was bound; scalding is our trick, the same as for the mini-pies.
  3. When cool enough to touch, add the yolks and knead until smooth and pliable. If it crumbles, add cold water a spoonful at a time. Cover and rest 20 minutes.
  4. Shape 8 round, flattish loaves about 2 cm high and set them on an oiled tray. Heat the oven to 200 °C.
  5. Bake 25–30 minutes, until golden with a firm crust. With real carimã the crumb is dense, moist and slightly sour; it won't rise like wheat bread.
  6. Before sundown, cool on a rack and keep under a cloth. Serve on Saturday with the stew.

Sabbath bread? In Jewish law only bread of wheat, barley, spelt, rye or oats counts as bread for the blessing and for the two Sabbath loaves. Carimã bread would have been on the table as food, not in place of those loaves. There is no record of what Branca's household did about this.

Beijus and tapiocas of 1587

from grated, pressed sweet manioc, as Soares describes MAKES 10–12 THIN BEIJUS · FRIDAY MORNING

Soares: “Fazem mais d'esta massa, depois de espremida, umas filhós, a que chamam beijús, estendendo-a no alguidar sobre o fogo”, from the pressed mass they make flat cakes called beijus, spread in a clay pan over the fire, “tão delgadas como filhós mouriscas”, as thin as Moorish fritters, cooked “até que ficam muito seccas e torradas”, until very dry and toasted. From the same mass they make “tapiocas, as quaes são grossas como filhós de polme”, thick as batter fritters, eaten hot (pp. 189–190). For sea voyages they took “beijús grossos muito torrados”, thick, well-toasted beijus (pp. 194–195). Brandão: beijus, “por outro nome tapioca, das quaes se servem na mesa em lugar de pão, e duram muitos dias”, also called tapioca, served at table instead of bread, and they keep many days (p. 178). The manioc panellada above uses ready-made hydrated tapioca starch, the modern shortcut; this version starts from the root, as in 1587.

Safety. Use only sweet manioc (aipim, macaxeira, often sold as cassava or yuca) sold for eating, never bitter manioc, and never eat the mass raw.

Ingredients

  • Sweet manioc (aipim) · 1 kg
  • Salt, a pinch, optional (Soares doesn't mention salt)

Equipment

  • Fine grater, a clean cloth, a sieve and a heavy frying pan or griddle, in place of the clay alguidar

Method

  1. Grate. Peel the manioc, remove the fibrous core and grate it fine.
  2. Squeeze the mass hard in a cloth over a bowl, to get out as much liquid as you can. Leave the liquid to stand for 1 hour: the starch settles at the bottom. Pour off and discard the liquid, and mix the starch back into the mass. Brandão says that for good farinha “lhe hão de lançar tapioca, quanto mais lhe lançam, tanto melhor”, you must add tapioca, and the more the better (pp. 175–176).
  3. Sieve the mass until loose, like damp flour. Add the salt, if using.
  4. Thin beijus. Heat the dry pan over medium heat. Spread a thin layer, 2–3 mm, and press lightly. When it sets and loosens, turn it. Keep turning over low heat until both sides are dry and toasted, 5–6 minutes. Cool on a rack.
  5. Thick tapiocas. Make 1 cm layers over lower heat, covered, about 5 minutes a side, until cooked through. Eat hot; Soares served them with milk or sugar, but at a meat meal they go with the stew's broth.
  6. Keeping beijus. Soares's thick, well-toasted ones: make them like the thin ones, 5 mm thick, then dry in the oven at 120 °C for about 1 hour, until hard right through. They keep for days in a dry jar.

Sealing the pot and keeping it hot

what the sources describe

Branca's household sealed the lid with dough and put the pot in an oven: “barravão lhe o testo com massa ao redor e metiamna dentro em hum forno” (Anna Lins, Denunciações, p. 57). Other households of the time closed and kept their pots hot in several other ways.

With dough or clay

MethodSource
A rope or collar of flour-and-water dough round the rim, with the lid pressed onto it; it bakes on tightA Drizzle of Honey, p. 18; Roden, pp. 126, 367
Dough smeared over the join between pot and lid. Barrar means to smear or plaster, so this fits Branca's record as well as a rope doesDenunciações, p. 57
Clay instead of dough, used to seal communal ovens for the nightRoden, pp. 127, 367
Tapioca-starch or carimã paste, the Brazilian version in the manioc panellada aboveInference; no source describes it

Without dough

MethodSource
A green lid: chopped, crushed chard laid on top, or radish leaves if there was no chardToledo, testimony of 1523 (Piñer, Jews, Food, and Spain, p. 200)
A cauldron with fire in it set on top of the pot overnightBlanca Ramírez, Toledo, 1523 (pp. 203–204)
Covered with embers and hot ashesBernáldez (Piñer, Sephardi, p. 103); the FIRC glossary, “con rescoldo y brasas” (Jews, Food, and Spain, p. 198)
Kept hot on the hearth (fogaril) until the Saturday mealThe aní of Valencia (Jews, Food, and Spain, p. 199)
Buried in a pit of embers, which is what dafina, “buried”, recallsRoden, p. 367
Taken to a communal or baker's ovenRoden, pp. 126, 367
Wrapped in blankets, cushions or old coats, or set in the embers that heated the public bathsRoden, pp. 367, 378; later practice in Egypt and Iraq

Was Branca's dish a pie? No. A Drizzle of Honey (p. 225) and Piñer (Sephardi, p. 116) read Anna Lins's words as a meat pie, but the meat went “na panella”, into the pot; testo is a pot lid; and in “metiamna”, “they put it in”, the feminine -na refers back to panella. Anna Lins calls the dish a panellada, and Joanna Fernandes describes a yellow dish of crushed chickpeas and chopped meat (p. 31), not a pastry. Pies were a real Sabbath food, which is why the empanada above is a fair variation, but not her recipe.