Last weekend we had a friend from London to stay. This was fun, not just because our guest was nice and not only because she brought us all kinds of yummy goodies from home, but also because her presence pushed us into doing a whole bunch of sight-seeing things that we probably wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. We wandered around a favela, we went to see some samba and spent a fair bit of time eating and drinking in Santa Teresa.
One of the places we ended up was Armazém São Thiago, a really nice old bar that dates back to 1919. The bar itself does pretty yummy food, but even better than that, on Sundays there is a lady just outside the bar cooking Acarajé.
A delicious bundle of spicy goodness. I am designating acarajé as an essential food – see the others in the list by clicking the ‘essential food’ label on the right (Photo: Leonardo Martins).
From time to time a curious thing happens when you are sitting outside a bar in Rio. You will be chatting away, drinking beer and gradually starting to get a little hungry when you glance down at the table and notice what appears to be a small post-it note on which are sitting 9 or 10 peanuts. Where did that come from?
Post-it peanuts – hard to resist when you’re drinking beer and caipirinha
Peanut sellers are found pretty much wherever there are a lot of people drinking at tables out on the street. Their strategy is to nip past, placing a few peanuts on a small scrap of paper on each table. They often whip past pretty quickly so if you happen to be involved in a conversation you might not notice them.
Imagine a 100% reliable hangover cure that was only available until 1pm (and you’d have to venture right out into the world to get it – it can’t be kept in your bedside drawer). That would lead to some tricky mental balancing acts on Sunday morning wouldn’t it?
“My head is in a world of pain and I would love to fix it up, BUT that would require me to get out of bed, get dressed and make my way to the market…” – tricky right?
When I am up early enough to catch the Sunday market in Gloria (it starts closing down around midday), the busiest stall by far is the one that sells Pastel (a light, crispy deep-fried pastry filled with cheese, meat, or various other fillings) and Caldo de Cana (sugarcane juice).
Those golden pastry pockets have various fillings. Most popular are cheese (pastel de queijo) and minced meat (pastel de carne). This is the first part of the cure.
Pasteis (the plural of Pastel) are one of the great Brazilian lanches (snacks), ranking up alongside Pão de queijo and Coxinha. You can buy the pastry ready-made and conveniently cut to shape in every supermarket here and I find that serving a few pasteis makes me very popular when we have guests. If you’re interested in making them for yourself and don’t live in Brazil then you should check out the excellent Flavors of Brazil blog which has a recipe for the pastry.
So, you’ve got your pastel – crispy, a little greasy with oozing melty cheese inside (the cheese ones are my favourite). This all sounds good for combating hangover symptoms. But on its own this will not be enough. You need a drink. A fresh, sweet drink.
Step 1: Get a truck full of sugar cane
Step 2: Pass sugar cane through industrial sugarcane mangle machine. Catch juice in jug.
Step 3: Take mangled sugarcane stems, twist them together, then pass them through a second time.
Step 4: Discard sugarcane pulp
Follow these steps and you will get this, a golden-green cup of magic:
Golden-Green Elixir – this will fix you up
Ice cold cups of caldo de cana are pretty much mandatory alongside your pastel. A sip of this sweet juice, followed by a bite of cheesy pastry, followed by more juice and before long you’ll be making plans for a trip to the beach, perhaps a few beers and later on maybe a churrasco!
In my post The Bread Man Alarm Clock, I told you about a guy who walks up my street each morning with a big basket of bread on his back, calling out to let everyone know that he is coming. ‘The Bread Man’ unknowingly acts as my alarm clock each morning, letting me know it’s time to get up.
Well, at the end of that post I promised than interview which never appeared. Having had a quick chat with him, I had planned to do some proper Q&A the next morning. But then the next morning there was no Bread Man, no alarm clock, no interview (and I was late for work!). The days turned into weeks and I started to wonder if he’d gone for good.
Well, I’m happy to be able to report that a couple of days ago his familiar cry once again echoed off the cobblestones (paralelepípedos) of our street and woke me from my slumber. And so I jumped out of bed, grabbed my camera and a notepad, and rushed downstairs to interrogate interview him. Here’s how it went (I have translated and paraphrased his responses):
As I mentioned in a previous post, my first eight months in Rio were spent living in my mother-in-law’s house in Alto Gávea, a wealthy neighbourhood in Rio’s Zona Sul. Although nearby Baixo Gávea can get quite rowdy (especially on Thursday and Sunday nights) the area around my mother-in-law’s house is more residential and tends to be quite peaceful.
So I got a shock when we moved to Santa Teresa – my ears were bombarded by a myriad of different noises. There are the sounds of concerts which pump up from nearby Lapa; on Sundays we hear Baile Funk [BUY-lee funk] parties from the nearby Morro do Santo Amaro favela; on my way home from work I pass the International Foundation of Angolan Capoeira and often hear their lovely music and singing.
Outside my window I hear the tiny monkeys that squeal to each other as they run along the telephone lines in the street.
These tiny monkeys, micos, scamper along the cables, constantly calling to each other with squeals so high-pitched they are only just audible.
