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There is no telling how halwa made its way from the Middle East to my part of northeast Brazil. Quite possibly  it travelled with  Sephardic Jews who fled Europe or who were sent into exile. There is also a chance that it arrived with Christian  immigrants whose culinary repertoire included dishes from Islamic Iberia. Either way, by my maternal grandmother’s time, its Arabic name had been changed to an abbreviated form of the  Portuguese word for spices, especie, from especiarias. The original recipe itself underwent a transformation to  include manioc flour, the byproduct of the poisonous manioc plant, Manihot esculenta,  that African slaves brought  to the New World along with the formula to make it edible.

My grandmother needed no recipe to make the Brazilian version of halwa.  Most probably she memorised it when  she watched former slaves prepare it in her father’s kitchen. Quick digression–slavery ended in 1888, in Brazil. My grandmother was born two years later. She neither took part in exploiting Africans nor did she profit from slavery. As for her father, this is neither the time nor place for his story. Well then, back to halwa and its romantic associations with  an Islamic Iberia so many ing contemporary historians paint in pretty pastel colors. Allow me to join them in ignoring  Moorish rulers’ stringent rules for  those they conquered. Let me dwell on the fuzzy-wuzzy view of unpleasant events and leave out these rulers’  occasional massacres of Christians and Jews, their contempt for women. Rather, let me talk about feasts in the gardens of the Alhambra. Let me envision an assembly of guests dressed  in fine brocade–men only except for women musicians and dancers, people  too low on the social scale to matter much.  But who cares about inequality when the music of the oud harmonizes with the song of water fountains and  the perfume of roses and carnations fills the air?    Unless the current ruler is a fanatic recently arrived from a goat skin tent city in the desert, there is probably wine to go with pastilla, the chicken and almond pastry  that best represents  Ibero-Arabian fusion   cuisine. Let me focus on that. Let me picture doe-eyed men with falcon profile,  listening to such entrancing muwashashat  they remain oblivious of the succulent bits of  pastilla filling they hold in the perfumed fingers of their right hand. Let see that  when slaves–slavery is not a European invention–cleared away the remains of chicken pie,  after the men washed their hands in rose water, perhaps it was time for veiled Circassian captives  to bring in gold  plates heaped with sesame seed  halwa. It all sounds like a fragment from a romance novel, doesn’t it? Such is the real  history of  Iberia.

Though she did not know it, my grandmother held much of Islamic Iberia in her memory. Grandmothers often are the transmitters of memories. Their role includes link past and present generations.  But my grandmother did not think in such terms,  For her, cooking, praying, and singing ancient songs were simply part of her family tradition. I doubt that she ever took the time to question any of them.  Past and present merged in her as naturally as the rain falls and the crops mature. There was no symbolism in the   halwa she sent me when I was away from home. There was no reminder of who we had been five centuries earlier,  in Toledo, Spain.  My grandmother did not know that her family whose name she shared had a name in Aramaic. All she knew was a sweet way of comforting a grandchild far from home.
Halwa is a marvelous comfort.  Mine arrived in a clear glass jar that made its  promise of sweetness a visual experience that expanded to include the familiar  scent of clover and  cinnamon. To dip  a spoon into the rich mix of tahini, sugar and manioc flour was to recall the flavors of childhood–smoky  roasted sesame seeds and brown sugar. Sadly, I did not honor the family tradition of memorizing recipes.  Many years after I left school, I traveled to another continent. But  I did not forsake halwa in my travels.  I ate it in Fargo, North Dakota where it was popular with German-Russian immigrants. I ate in  Georgetown, Maryland, where Middle Eastern diplomats shop. I ate  at the Rue des Rosiers, in Paris.  None of it tasted exactly like my grandmother’s. None of it had the taste of home.

 

PIGEONS IN THE PARK

Arroz do Maranhao.

 

Squab from D’Artagnan.

 

Arroz do Maranhao.

Long before Tom Lehrer sang about poisoning pigeons in the park, Ernest Hemingway stealthily decimated the pigeon population of the Luxemburg Gardens, in Paris. The time was the mid-Twenties when poverty was romantic provided that you were an American writer married to a woman with a trust fund. That was when the budding novelist frequented  the Brasserie Lipp, La  Closerie des Lilas, Cafe’ Flore, Les Deux Magots during the day and sipped  liqueur with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in the evening.Somewhere in between, he wrote  and tended his first child whom he would occasionally take  to the Medici Fountain at the Luxemburg for an airing. There when no one was looking, he would strangle foolhardy pigeons and stash their carcasses in the baby’s pram for future consumption. It is possible–and anything is possible with American literary myths–that the stowaway pigeons inspired him to call his Paris memoirs A MOVEABLE FEAST.

My own pigeon-based repasts  had another setting. They happened in a huge double house  my parents shared with close relatives in the outskirts of a small town Ceara’, Brazil. I must have been six or seven at the time and this house remains in my memory as a place of magical beauty. It was set next to woods where poisonous snakes and free range chickens lived in an entente cordiale and where I hid under a fragrant green dome of  velame, Croton campestris,  to read my father’s copy of LES MISERABLES, of which I understood next to nothing.

All paradises have serpents. Mine had, besides real reptiles,  an intractable, somewhat mad second cousin who terrified me with his angry outbursts. He was, however, a passionate hunter who often brought home fat bags of quail and  rolinha caldo de feijao, Columbina talparcoti, which he roasted on an open fire.Woe to me if I glanced at him while he drowned his roasted birds in malagueta pepper sauce.

“‘Are you spying on me,” he’d roar.That was a grave accusation.

That was a grave accusation. Espiar, to spy had a double meaning in my part of Brazil. It could be understood as “ogling someone’s food” which hinted at being hungry, therefore poor, something Ibero-Brazilians hated to make known.Only beggars had the right to flaunt their poverty.Everyone else ought to  have the decorum of the  bankrupt Spanish grandee so aptly described in  the saying, por cima tanta farofa, por baixo mulambo so’ —so much fancy stuff on top and nothing but  rags underneath. But for people of means be as undignified as to display their hunger in public was shameful and demeaning. Such behavior in a child my age meant that was mal educada, badly educated, badly brought up,  ill-mannered.) An ill-mannered child reflected badly on her parents and to tarnish the parental image was serious stuff. Life was complicated back then. As for the other meaning of espiar, it was to spy. Again, serious stuff  for people of the Crypto-Jewishpersuasion. One’s choice of food was an indicator of one’s religious practices and throughout centuries,  many a Crypto-Jew perished in the flames of the Iberian Inquisition for choosing olive oil instead pork fat or for refusing to mix milk products and meat at the same meal.

Whether my second cousin’s paranoid fear of  spies had to do with hidden Judaism or not, I  do not know.  All I know is that his anger often went as suddenly as it came. In his calm moments, he was generous enough to share his food–roasted quail, boiled umari, Poraqueiba cericea nut, wild honey in the comb,  and once in a great while, squab from his dovecote.

Maybe one has to be a bit mad to kill four-week-old pigeons. They look so utterly helpless, so unfinished, so vulnerable in their huge-beaked, bright-eyed, sparsely feathered vulnerability.  But sympathy for members of  the animal kingdom was rare when I was little.   As long as they fit into Jewish dietary laws, birds  were for eating. In the Middle east, pigeons  had been on the menu since Biblical times. I imagine that while they lived in Spain where, allegedly, they were taken by the Romans after the fall of the Second Temple, my ancestors ate b’stilla, the Hispano-Moorish pigeon, almond, cinnamon, and sugar pie the recipe for which exiles from Iberia took to with them to Morocco following the 1492 Expulsion.

My folks did not make B’stilla. After  half a millennium in Brazil, their recipe for warka, the translucent, phyllo-like dough that envelops the filling of b’stilla,  must have disappeared along with their  Hebrew and Judeo-Spanish. Dona Julia, my parents’ cook did not have the skill needed to replicate the food of Hispano-Jewish banquets. Even so, what she did with my cousin’s squab, was brilliant.  She cooked them in an ample quantity of broth to which she added rice–Maranhao red rice, if I can trust my memory of that long-ago meal–to make a casserole.

I do not recall watching the transmutation of  squab and rice into a dish similar to the sopa seca of Spanish-speaking countries, but I have a vivid memory of how it  looked and smelled when it came to the table–fist-sized, golden birds lay on a bed of red  rice spangled with golden coins of fat. A pool of rich broth redolent of annato seeds, garlic, shallots, black pepper,  cilantro and chives encircled the rice. It was the food of dreams, infused with the evanescing  memory of Judean banquets, Roman feasts,  and celebrations in the  Moorish-Iberia of my maternal ancestors.

Should I decide to emulate Hemingway, there is a little park near my house where I can push an empty pram. There  should be no health concerns. According to James LeRay Morgan, author of CULINARY CREATION, ” squab meat is regarded as safer than some other poultry products as it harbors fewer pathogens (than poultry) and may be served between medium and well-done.” Trouble is, the local gendarmerie police patrols the park more assiduously than the guards of the Luxemburg Gardens did in Hemingway’s time. It would be wiser to order squab from suppliers in California. D’Artagnan, for example,   offers the choice of squab with  head and feet still attached and the decapitated variety. I would go for the  headless and footless bird. As a person twenty-first-century sensitivities, I no longer care to be reminded the appearance of  live animals prior to their  arrival at my plate. I do not have access to a source of freshly harvested arroz do Maranhao, but I have a stash of red Himalayan rice that should be a good substitute.

 

Arroz do Maranhao on the left.

Please click on the for the Recipe

 

GLOSSARY

Anatto–Annatto (/əˈnætoʊ/ or /əˈnɑːtoʊ/) is an orange-red condiment and food coloring derived from the seeds of the achiote tree (Bixa orellana). It is often used to impart a yellow or orange color to foods, but sometimes also for its flavor and aroma. Its scent is described as “slightly peppery with a hint of nutmeg” and flavor as “slightly nutty, sweet and peppery.”Wikipedia

Crypto-Jew–Forcibly baptised Sephardic Jews and their descendants who continued to keep Judaic traditions secretly.
“Malagueta pepper Capsicum frutescens is a species of chili pepper that is sometimes considered to be part of the species Capsicum annuum.^[1] Pepper cultivars of Capsicum frutescens can be annual or short-lived perennial plants.”Wikipedia

 

THE SEA, THE SEA

 

Look up codfish on the web and you face a deluge of information of astounding similarity. You find out that the Basque were the earliest Europeans to fish for the Atlantic cod,  Gadus morhua in late 15th. century Newfoundland. They were soon followed by the Portuguese, whose Catholic faith  that forbade meat-eating on Fridays, Lent and other occasions. Dried and salted codfish thus became a staple in  Portuguese menus. So much so that it consumers named it fiel amigo, faithful friend. According to folklore, the Portuguese cuisine boasts a codfish recipe for every day of the year. Best known among these are Bacalhau à Gomes de Sá, a cod casserole that includes potatoes, olives, parsley , onions, and fresh lemon slices; Bolinhos de Bacalhau, fritters made with dried cod, mashed potatoes, garlic,  onions, and parsley; Sopa de Bacalhau com Tomates e Beldroegas, a soup that includes cod, tomatoes, and purslane.

Thanks to my Brazilian origins, my cooking repertoire includes not only  Bolinhos de Bacalhau, but one of my favorite dishes, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco, Cod and Coconut Milk,  an Afro-tropical take on the traditional European Portuguese recipe. There are many variations on this theme. Some call for carrots and  potatoes while others include green, red, and yellow peppers. Traditionally, Bacalhau com Leite de Coco is made with azeite de dendê, oil from the fruit of an African  palm tree, Elaeis guineensis.  but I have read recipes that call for olive oil  or soy oil. Having moved from Northeastern Brazil  to the Eastern United States decades ago,  I rarely found dried cod in local markets, let alone azeite de dendê  . Enter internet commerce, which  makes it possible  for me  to locate and buy the most recherché food products. That is how I lay my hands on two pounds of deboned salt cod packaged in  Brazil.

Portugal is no longer the world’s prime purveyor of salt cod. That honor goes to Norway,  which exports it wherever there is a demand, such as in Goa,  Jamaica, and the Madeira Islands. Thus, the codfish I bought recently  was a well-travelled fish. Compared to the cod Portugal exported to Brazil years ago, this deboned, plastic wrapped product  was a tame beast, a pallid version of the Iberian product. Nevertheless, I soaked in hot overnight, as one did the extremely salty bacalhau of my childhood. The following day I drained it  and added it, plus  a cup of diced tomatoes,  to an onion and two fat cloves of garlic sauteed in olive oil.  Once the resulting sauce thickened, I added  a twist of freshly ground black pepper, a sprinkle of oregano, and  a tin of coconut milk. I let the mix simmer for twenty minutes prior to throwing in half a cup of whole wheat penne. Finally, I served it over a cup of fresh spinach and garnished it with  a handful of chopped fresh coriander.It was a good soup though mild and somewhat characterless dish compared to the food served at my mother’s table. I suspect neither my seafaring Iberian ancestors nor my coastal Brazil relatives would not have thought much of it. But I live far from the sea. There are no palms in my adopted hometown. My olive oil comes from Tunisia and coconut milk comes from Sri Lanka. I do what I have been doing since I left my home country–I adapt, adapt then adapt some more. That is what immigrants do. That is, no doubt what my Iberian  ancestors did when they reached the New World.I may live in a global village, but  longing for  the salty taste of the sea is part of my ancestral memory. Soon I will try to duplicate my mother’s Bolinhos de Bacalhau. But that is another post.