Feijoada

At lunch today I had my first taste of feijoada, one of Brazil's national dishes. It's a black bean stew infused with offal and some of the less desirable parts of the pig, and has its roots as a slave dish made from the leftovers of slaveowners' kitchens. Like many of the dishes from the American south, like gumbo, feijoada is a tasty combination of a variety of ingredients, and is sort of a fusion of different culinary traditions. Copacabana.com has more:

"The origin of the feijoada runs back to the sixteenth century with the introduction of slaves in Brazil. Slaves were used for many things, cotton production, cocoa production, rubber and with the goldrush boom for extraction of dimonds and mine digging.

The culinary culture of Africa was mixed with the European food traditions. The African slaves had the basic bean stew, the Portuguese added the linguiça (sausage), and the Indians added the farofa (toasted manioc flour). The result was a particularly "heavy" dish wich lasted long and gave the workers the energy they needed, the feijoada!"