Like American cuisine, Brazilian cuisine is an amalgamation of mixed cultures, particularly those of native peoples, African slaves and Portuguese explorers. Because Brazil is a large country, it is usual to find an ingredient having different names in different regions, or a dish with the same name nationwide, but containing different ingredients or composition, Perin says. Standardized preparation of recipes is difficult due to several factors including transportation and fragility of many products. Yet the result is an intriguing set of foodways that make up Brazil.

Around the world, Brazilian embassies often showcase the Afro-Brazilian cuisine of Bahia, one of the largest of 26 states in the northeastern part of the country on the Atlantic coast, because of the cuisine’s vividness, simplicity and resemblance to the street foods of Salvador, the state’s capital city, Perin says. Bahian cuisine developed from African slaves learning from native women how to incorporate indigenous herbs and other ingredients such as coconut milk, dende (palm) oil, peanuts and okra with food preparations brought from their homelands.

Perin believes Brazilian cuisine is important to teach in U.S. culinary-arts programs because of its growing perception as one of the world’s major cuisines. More Brazilian ingredients, such as dende oil, are easier to find in the States today, although many remain difficult to source. Still, Perin says many principles of Brazilian cuisine can be taught using readily available ingredients as reasonable approximations.

Perin’s presentation for CAFÉ will give U.S. educators a platform from which to introduce Brazilian cuisine to students, and is downloadable here. Note that the file is more than 7 mb. in PowerPoint format.