AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DINNERS - BRAZIL

Our long but comfortable British Airways flight, via London and São Paulo, arrives in Rio de Janeiro at midmorning on a Saturday, always an auspicious day in the city. “Think of it like Thanksgiving,” Bill tells Jan and Mary, two friends joining us in Brazil. “Only it happens every week.”

“And instead of a big, bland bird at the center of the table,” Cheryl adds, “you get the most sumptuous pork and beans on the planet.”

“Of course, you can eat feijoada anytime—it’s the national dish, after all—but Saturday lunch is the traditional feasting hour,” Bill says. “Few cooks or restaurants serve the whole completa version at night because it’s too much food for then. They reserve it instead for a leisurely midday weekend meal, when everyone can take a nap afterward, preferably on the beach.”

Mary Jablonsky agrees to the idea with resignation. A close friend of Cheryl’s for decades, she’s always game for any adventure—like her traveling companion, Jan Kohler—but Mary is also apprehensive about some of our eating enthusiasms. “Just don’t expect me to try any ugly pig parts. You guys have never had to inspect slaughterhouses, like I did in my early years at Kraft. I’ve seen plenty of hog chow that will never cross my lips.”

“If you end up with a trotter on your plate,” Bill says, smiling, “pass it along to me. You may not know it, but I’ve got a bit of a foot fetish.”

Mary and Jan flew into Rio from Chicago and Boston, respectively, the day before, and have just welcomed us to the Ipanema Plaza Hotel, our mutual residence for the next three nights. “So where do you want to go to satisfy your little obsession?” Mary asks.

“I’ve narrowed the choices to two,” Bill replies. “The nearby, posh Caesar Park Hotel has a feijoada buffet on Saturday, though the setting doesn’t seem right. This is a slave dish, after all, not an upper-crust meal. But the best alternative, an old institution called Confeitaria Colombo, is downtown, a fair distance by cab.”

“Let’s go there,” Jan says. “It will give us a chance to see more of the city.”

The trip certainly does. Our inexperienced but eager-to-please taxi driver, unaccustomed to requests to go to the rather dowdy Centro, can’t find the restaurant. He’s heard the name, and knows the general location, but takes us around in circles for more than an hour before finally dropping us off. By the time we’re seated, around 2:00 in the afternoon, most of the other patrons are moving on to dessert, and when we leave three hours later, no other diners remain.

Confeitaria Colombo opened in 1894, just as the historic downtown entered its golden age. For the first half of the twentieth century, until the national government began moving in 1960 to the new capital of Brasilia, this square mile of metropolis glittered more brightly than any spot in Latin America. It housed not only both branches of Congress and a multitude of ministries, but also Brazil’s most prominent theaters, newspapers, banks, hotels, restaurants, and dance halls.

Few places represented the vibrant magnificence better than the Colombo. Portuguese immigrants founded the establishment as a pastry and sweets salon (hence, confeitaria) and added a fashionable ladies’ tearoom in 1922 that evolved into a restaurant. It still looks today like it did then, brimming with belle époque splendor. A massive stained-glass ceiling splashes tinted sunlight across display cases filled with cakes and candies, tables topped with Italian marble, ornate French fixtures, Portuguese tile floors, and, best of all, eight monumental Belgian mirrors that each weigh as much as a car. In its heyday, the Colombo hosted the political, business, and intellectual elites of the city, including such regulars as poet Olavo Bilac. This Saturday, the restaurant, like the rest of the Centro these days, has to settle for ordinary folks like us.

Following custom, we start our feijoada banquet with a caipirinha, our first of dozens over the days ahead. A potent blend of Brazilian cachaça (strong sugarcane brandy) and coarse sugar muddled with the juice of a lime cut into small chunks, the drink supposedly cuts the fatty richness of feijoada. Whatever: it tastes great. While we sip the cocktails, Cheryl and Mary regale Jan and Bill with stories of their first trips together in Europe, when they both spent a year abroad at Salzburg College. Mary laughs about some of the guys Cheryl attracted, particularly a vagabond sailor in Majorca, saying, “Even Bill the reprobate was a better catch than him.”

Cheryl retorts, “At least I wasn’t loony enough to jump into Venice’s Grand Canal.”

“Those jerks who made the dare promised me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s for that and never even gave me a drop.”

The tales stop temporarily with the appearance of two formally attired waiters, a grizzled veteran of fifty-two years with a sly sense of humor and a more proper young man who speaks some English. They motion with a broad sweep of their arms at the buffet setup, ready apparently to give us a joint tour of the goodies. Pointing one at a time to a variety of big iron pots on a large central table, the younger gent recites, “Black beans, pork ribs, smoked pork loin, peppered pork sausage, carne de sol,” which is salted, sun-dried beef. His colleague starts adding emphasis now to the enumeration by indicating different parts of his body. “Beef tongue, pork ears, pork feet, and pork tails.”

A second long table nearby offers a profusion of possible accompaniments, accents, and side dishes: rice, vinegar laced with hot malagueta chiles, sautéed collard greens, orange segments, farofa (toasted manioc meal), sautéed plantains, and banana fritters. Another smaller table presents a dozen desserts, mostly custards and meringues. Starting with a foundation of beans, guests fill their plates—repeatedly in our case—with any combination of foods they desire.

Mary and Jan, feeling their way gingerly into the new cuisine, stick with familiar meats and a healthy assortment of vegetables, grains, and fruits. The two of us, having eaten sanitized American versions of feijoada before, are eager to try the real deal, and we dive in more fully. Cheryl samples a little of everything except the earthiest meats, while Bill skimps on the sides and desserts to leave ample room for all the pork and beef parts. The cooking isn’t stellar, but the bounty is, leaving all of us happily satiated.

When the waiters bring the check, the older one, grinning infectiously, hands each of us a souvenir caipirinha glass with the name and logo of the restaurant. It’s a goofy memento, the kind of kitschy curio we stopped collecting years ago, but we keep the tumblers and haul them all the way home. They will be a reminder for life of an indulgent Thanksgiving afternoon in Rio de Janeiro.

As the urban energy ebbed in the historic Centro, it flowed straight toward the shore, especially the beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, and, more recently, the relatively distant Barra de Tijuca. Though it may seem odd today, most of the world, including Rio, didn’t discover beaches as potential playgrounds until the twentieth century. Before then, they attracted little interest except as handy anchorages for fishing boats, or for the adventurous, serene spots for a stroll or a swim. In Rio and elsewhere, few people could even reach a grand beach before modern transportation provided access on rails, roads, and airways.

Using tunnels cut through the mountains south of downtown, trams arrived in 1892 at Copacabana, the closest of the major beaches, prompting the construction of some isolated summer residences. More substantial development didn’t begin for another thirty years, until a wealthy visionary opened the opulent Copacabana Palace as a retreat in Rio for international royalty and the merely rich of the world. Within the following thirty years, the population of the neighborhood increased tenfold and started spilling farther south toward Ipanema, only a small bohemian enclave at the time.

Tom Jobim and Vinicius de Moraes enjoyed that offbeat spirit in Ipanema but accidentally helped to change it forever. Drinking beer together one day in a scruffy bar by the beach, they watched a lovely young girl walk by, swaying her hips gracefully. Jobim composed a lilting bossa nova score to extol her graceful cadence and Vinicius contributed lyrics for the tribute. When João and Astrud Gilberto teamed up with Stan Getz the next year, in 1963, to record “The Girl from Ipanema,” suddenly every man on earth—most of all, twenty-one-year-old Bill—wanted to rush to the area and fall into step right behind her.

Bill spots her on Sunday, dozens of times, and again just as often on Monday when we return to the sand for a second visit. She’s everywhere along the seaside, generally arm in arm with the Boy from Ipanema. Wherever we look in the crowds on the long, broad shore, we see them sashaying and playing, usually in such a carefree, guileless manner that it grabs our attention over and over. The attire is different each time—though always so skimpy that it never taxes the imagination—and most reassuringly for old, overclothed white folks like the two of us, the ages, shapes, and skin colors encompass the full range of human possibilities. The Girl and Boy are forever young but also maturing well, hefty and light, lanky and squat, black, brown, bronze, pink, and every hue in between.

Cheryl marvels at the jaunty, easygoing mood. “This is such a local scene, not at all like a stilted tourist beach or a pretentious resort beach.” No hotels or other buildings intrude on the atmosphere. The closest structures—mainly tasteful mid-rise, multifamily residences interspersed with an occasional hotel or restaurant—sit well back from the sand across a broad boulevard, certainly visible but not at all imposing. As far as we can determine, not a single T-shirt or other ticky-tacky shop exists within blocks.

Even the ubiquitous beach vendors respect the laid-back mood, pushing their jewelry, sunglasses, press-on tattoos, pareos, and other goods only when someone shows interest. The four of us pass on everything except the charcoal-grilled cheese, sold by guys who lug around a hibachi loaded with glowing coals and a small ice chest holding thick slices of a Halloumi-like cheese on a stick. They sear the outside of the cheese over the fire and serve it warm, with an herb coating or a hot sauce if you wish. “Now this is what people are meant to eat,” Mary tells Bill.

After our first outing on the beach, a short tree-lined block from the hotel, we take a taxi to the top of the town. The view from Corcovado Hill, towering 2,300 feet above the coast, astounds us and everyone around us—except maybe the ones trying to take in everything through the lens of a video recorder—and confirms our impression that Rio enjoys the most spectacular natural setting of any city we’ve ever visited. Though other mountains block part of the perspective to the south, you can see all of the striking Guanabara Bay, the Centro, Sugar Loaf Mountain, the principal beaches, dozens of residential areas, including some of the favela slums, and of course, rising another one hundred feet above you, Brazil’s most famous postcard image, the art deco statue of Christ spreading his arms wide to embrace the faithful. Even the ride up and down thrills our crew, winding around the humpback contour that gives the peak its name through the world’s largest urban forest, the Tijuca National Park, an immense jungle that makes New York’s Central Park seem like a suburban backyard.

When we return from the heights, we ask our cabdriver to drop us at the main market square in our Ipanema neighborhood, Praça General Osório. During most of the week it functions as a full-blown food market—offering everything from luscious tropical fruit to whole chickens, complete with their blood in a bag—then on Sundays becomes the scene of the Feira Hippie (yes, Hippie Fair). Our quartet finds a trove of oddball treasures in the stalls, but not a single identifiable hippie. Mary and Jan pick up some belts, jewelry, and Christmas gifts, while we browse seriously with less success through several tables of handmade crafts.

In the end, the two of us lay out money only at a lunch and sweets booth operated by Baianas (ladies from the state of Bahia, our next stop in Brazil), who enjoy fame across the country for their great street food. To check whether they’re offering the real thing or a big-city imitation, at first we just share one of the signature black-eyed pea fritters called acarajé. After frying the cake in dendê, a red palm oil, the cooks split it and give us a choice of toppings. Cheryl chooses for us the fiery red chile paste vatapá (a puree of shrimp, bread, nuts, and coconut milk) and caruru (stewed-down okra and shrimp sometimes compared to gumbo). Glory be, it’s heavenly. Cheryl rushes off to get Mary and Jan, drags them back, and all of us dig in with gusto, ordering more acarajés, coconut patties, flan, and an unusual banana pudding with layers of cake and meringue.

Too bad the Baianas are not in the kitchens at the two churrascaria restaurants we try, both of which could use a little help with the food preparation. A Brazilian institution exported in recent years to other parts of the world, including the United States, a churrascaria specializes in meats served rodizio-style at the table by a parade of waiters carrying cuts of beef, pork, lamb, chicken, and sausage on large metal cooking spits. For a starter course, diners graze an extensive buffet, usually including a variety of salads, sushi, and fish dishes, supplemented by starchy sides—such as empanadas and pão de queijo (tasty mozzarella-like cheese balls)—brought directly to the table. After guests are stuffed with meat and signal that by turning a card in front of them to the “não, obrigado” side, they return to another section of the buffet for a choice of desserts. The format emphasizes quantity over quality, of course, but it’s too local to overlook.

Our initial experience goes pleasantly at Churrascaria Carretão, a short walk from our hotel and chosen in part because of that. Rio has a reputation as a dangerous city for tourists, a place where thieves often prefer confrontational robbery to purse-snatching or pickpocketing. None of us ever sees anything suspicious or feels the least threatened, but we stay cautious when we’re out on foot. The Carretão surprises us at first with its merry ambiance, reminiscent of what we’ve seen earlier in the day on Ipanema Beach. The reason quickly becomes apparent: most of the customers came directly from the sand, hardly bothering in many cases to slip a modest cover-up over their thong bikinis and Speedos.

During dinner, right after one scurrying waiter almost spears a barely clad behind with his spit, Mary asks us about our last stop in France, where the three of us have traveled together before. “Actually,” Bill says, “there are surprising similarities between Nice and Rio. Take Carnival, for example. Nice invented it in the Middle Ages and Rio re-created it for modern times, just for the sake of lusty amusement in both cases. The cities even look a little alike, sitting on big bays below lofty hills, and the residents of each clearly have a local style of their own, a kind of trademark joie de vivre.”

“Do you know that the first European settlers of Rio were French?” Cheryl asks. “French pirates came first, followed by an official colony called ‘Antarctic France.’ In a good book I’m reading about Rio right now, Brazilian writer Ruy Castro says most of the pioneers went gaga over the local Indian women, who apparently were a male fantasy, always naked and horny. Their commander, a strict Catholic, got fed up with frequent orgies and declared he would start hanging raunchy settlers. That caused so many men to desert and move inland, the colony collapsed.”

Looking around the room at the nearly naked patrons, Jan says, “Maybe the honcho misunderstood Rio’s destiny. By the way, has anyone noticed where guys keep stuff like wallets and house keys in a Speedo?”

Several caipirinhas and the ongoing floor show make up for the shortcomings in the food, leaving us in a jovial mood as the evening ends. So we head to another churrascaria the next night, this one a taxi ride away in Leblon, but it disappoints us compared with the Carretão, distinguishing itself primarily by a stuffier atmosphere, more condescending service, and a check three times greater. The sole redeeming grace of the evening is the trip back to our hotel, which takes us by a lagoon festooned with a giant Christmas tree—twenty-seven stories high—floating on a barely visible barge. Approximately three million lights blaze through revolving patterns of display, casting dazzling color across the water and the sky.

On our last morning in town, just hours before our departure for Salvador, Bahia, Mary pushes the rest of us to go to the Carmen Miranda Museum, despite reports that it’s tiny and has frustrated many fans. Humoring her initially, we end up thanking her profusely. The bunkerlike building is minuscule, severely limiting the display space, but the costumes, photos, and film clips turn us from curious, detached observers into awed admirers. The dynamic little lady—five feet tall on tiptoe—truly presented the best of Brazil to the world during her music and movie career from the 1930s to the 1950s, when she reigned as one of the queens of Hollywood.

Our perspective totally flip-flops on the most fanciful aspects of her stage and screen persona. Her whimsical headdresses, we learn, drew their inspiration from the distinctive turbans worn by the Baianas and, for practical purposes, compensated for her height, allowing her to star in movies alongside the much taller leading men of the day. Her elaborate outfits, bountiful bangles, and sensual hand movements also mimicked Baiana style, and her sense of rhythm in songs and dances reflected the booming music scene in Rio at the time. What once seemed caricature to us now seems brilliantly real, even when she dons tropical dress on celluloid and sings a “Home on the Range” tune about “where the cows and the cantaloupes play.”

The women are incredulous that the Museum lacks a gift shop, but Mary discovers right before we’re ready to leave that the small administrative office sells a few souvenirs. Our group buys out much of the stock, including jewelry boxes, purses, magnets, and shirts, demurring only on the Barbie-style dolls in Carmen costumes. Cheryl even considers getting one of them as a girlfriend for Flat Stanley but settles for taking a photo of him flirting with the whole troupe.

Jan and Bill depart, trying to pressure Mary and Cheryl to hurry up. With the impatient ones gone, the office manager asks the dallying pair, “Would you care to try on a replica of a Carmen headdress?” It’s like asking our editor if she wants this manuscript on time.

“This is really heavy!” Mary exclaims. “How could she possibly carry and balance it on her head through one of those bouncy dance numbers?”
“Just stand still and smile like a pinup girl,” Cheryl says, taking her photo multiple times. Switching roles, Cheryl poses next, trying to be both coy and sultry in a Carmen way.

“You got it, girl,” Mary says. “Now take a big bow for the camera without losing your crown.”

“Oh no!” the manager intervenes. “Don’t try that. You’ll dump out the bananas.”

Among all of our destinations on this trip, only Bali has been on our priority list for longer than Salvador. Rio becomes a fine bonus on the way here, significantly exceeding our expectations, but we’re eager now to see the place that gave birth to Brazil and continues to define its soul.

A thousand miles north of Rio, approaching the spot where South America juts east into the Atlantic and seems to point directly at Africa, Salvador served as the capital of colonial Brazil for the first two hundred years of the nation’s history. For even longer, its port controlled most foreign trade, exporting great quantities of sugar, the white gold of the northeast, and the real gold and diamonds extracted from southeastern mines. Some of that wealth stayed behind, financing magnificent homes, grand baroque churches, and steady growth. At the time of the American Revolution, Salvador surpassed any city in the future United States in population and splendor. Within the Portuguese empire, only Lisbon eclipsed it in prestige.

Slavery made it all possible. By the middle of the sixteenth century, sugarcane cultivation dominated the economy in the Bahia and Pernambuco regions around Salvador. In the eyes of the landowners, the arduous, relentless work in the fields required chattel labor from Africa. Brazil became the first area of the New World to exploit African slaves, and the country maintained the practice longer than any other, up to 1888. Of the eleven million people sold into slavery in the Americas, almost 40 percent came to Brazil, more than to anywhere else.


That kind of heritage definitely leaves a legacy. A proud European poise remains in Salvador, ingrained in the mores in many ways, but the city is fundamentally African, more so than any other place on this side of the Atlantic. It’s not just the ancestry of the population—90 percent wholly or partially African—but more critically, the traditions the residents maintain. In religion, music, movement, food, and more, Salvador exudes an indigenous Creole spirit unlike any other on earth.

The vitality of the city almost overwhelms us on our first night. Our flight arrives late due to a delay in Rio, pushing us into the thick of evening rush-hour traffic, which creeps in this city of two and a half million people. The taxi takes us past industrial zones, high-rise office buildings, shopping complexes, and sprawling residential areas before finally reaching Barra, the seaside neighborhood where we’re staying. When our driver gets to the Monte Pascoal Praia Hotel, we dump our bags in our adjoining rooms and take a quick look from our balconies out to the local beach, still buzzing with life under bright streetlamps.

Without wasting any more time, we’re off to Pelourinho, the historic center of town a few miles away. Our original plan called for us to be in the old city well before sunset, to get our bearings in daylight. This is Tuesday, the prime day of the week for local bands to perform on outdoor stages all around Pelourinho, and it’s also the first Tuesday of the month, a major payday and party day in Salvador. Our advance reading suggests the area is going to get crowded and boisterous, but what we find still bowls us over.

Our cab drops us at Praça da Sé, a plaza one block from the main square, Terreiro de Jesus. Right in front of us, as we shut the car doors, a large children’s chorus is singing Christmas carols in Portuguese. Most of the kids stand on an elevated stage, but some range farther afield, including in the windows of an adjoining colonial building. Massive speakers—they like the volume high in Salvador—boom the music to an appreciative, packed audience occupying every square inch of available space. The carols enchant us, especially “Silent Night,” though it seems curious to us at first that “silent” translates as feliz (happy or merry). Later in the week, we realize that the English word would have a negative connotation here; in a city so full of music, a silent night would seem dreary.

Just beyond the choir, in the midst of a swarm of people, Santa sits in a pretty, tinsel-covered, one-room house, taking requests from a long line of admiring youngsters. A dozen teenage elfettes, cloaked in red satin and faux ermine, assist Santa, as do a red-shirted security guard, three hunky shepherds with crooks, and several young women in Christmas tree and star outfits. Mary comments, “This is like going through Disney’s ‘It’s a Small World’ in a speedboat.”

After the cheerful overture with the children, we plunge into bigger adult crowds on Terreiro de Jesus. At food and drink stands lining three sides of the square and spilling into the streets, Baianas preside regally, attired in traditional white, with billowing skirts, puffy-sleeved lacy blouses, and blossomy turbans. A bandstand occupies the fourth flank, facing the cathedral. A few people watch the group playing now, but most cluster with friends, talking, laughing, gesturing.

On the dark fringes of the plaza, two young men dance acrobatically, not so much with each other as at each other. Bill recognizes the thrusting, fading, fluid movements as capoeira, a martial art that slaves brought from Africa and refined in Brazil, particularly in Bahia. Slave owners distrusted the skill, as you might expect, and eventually got capoeira banned, but it continued to flourish underground. Though it has spread around the globe now, Salvador remains the center for the teaching and practice of the ritualized craft. Performers pop up regularly around the city, always attracting a circle of fans.

The horde of revelers and the maelstrom of activity quickly disorient us. Without a map, and no streetlights to guide us beyond the busy square, we have no sense of where we are in relation to anything else in Pelourinho. Music reverberates dimly in the distance, but not clearly enough to follow the sound. Dodging and weaving our way through the throngs, the four of us wander aimlessly for a while before deciding to retreat inside for drinks and dinner at Axego, a second-story restaurant right off the plaza.

According to a story Bill came across on a good Salvador Web site (www.bahia-online.net), Manoel dos Santos Pereira founded Axego accidentally. He liked to cook on weekends for friends at his rustic summer home, which had a large terrace great for alfresco dining. One day a French guest at the nearby Club Med saw this happening, assumed the place was a lively restaurant, sat down, and ordered the dish of the day. Manoel served him happily, but when Monsieur asked for the check, the host tried to explain the situation, saying the meal was a gift. Probably not comprehending the Portuguese, the Frenchman came back the next weekend with a group of buddies determined to pay this time. Manoel took their money and went into business.

The menu—only in Portuguese, as is common in the city—offers Bahian specialties mainly, along with a smattering of other popular Brazilian dishes. In need of a calming elixir, we order a round of caipirinhas and some pão de queijo for nibbling. Then each of us gets an appetizer course of casquinha di siri, deviled sea crab served in a ceramic, shell-shaped dish with molho de pimenta, a hot sauce made in this case with bits of fresh red chile, onion, and tomato in a vinegar base. For an entrée, two large plates of pan-fried whole local sea bass amply satisfy our gang.

Since we arrived, a band has been playing somewhere below the restaurant’s back windows, but about the time the fish comes, a new group takes the stage and kicks up the beat substantially. The music now rocks the restaurant, sending us and the other guests into motion, tapping toes, beating fingers, shaking heads. Although we don’t know it yet, it’s the first of our several encounters with the amazing Olodum, which electrifies the Salvador Carnival parade each year with two hundred drummers, a number of singers, and thousands of dancers.

After leaving Axego, we head back to the bandstand on the main square, where an exceptionally energetic group is now performing to an enthralled audience. Three young female singers and dancers lead the ensemble, belting out lyrics while shimmying and pumping their pelvises, hips, arms, shoulders, and heads with such fervent abandon that you wonder how their bodies stay intact. Jan quietly says, “I’ve never seen anything more erotic in my life.” Bill stands agape, speechless. Our more restrained trio of ladies drags him to a nearby taxi and deposits him in the front passenger seat, alone with his reveries.

Our driver promptly jerks us all back to reality. He does the 0 to 60 routine in less time than it takes to grab a breath—without bothering to turn on the headlights, which he uses only occasionally later on the darkest streets we encounter. Red lights slow our suicidal momentum two or three times, though the driver ignores at least a dozen other stop signals, sometimes braking briefly for a glance in other directions but usually just zooming through intersections without heed. He gets us back to the hotel in one-third of the normal time, in direct but inverse correlation with the surge in our heart rates.

Over the next few days we settle in and sort out the pieces of our first-night experience. Gradually, we get to know every cobblestone street and many of the hidden courtyards of Pelourinho, learn that everyone disregards some red lights when they feel it’s safe to do so, and immerse ourselves in local food and music, both intricately tied to religion in this city. Eventually it dawns on us that Salvador is far and away the most exuberant city any of us has ever visited and that’s why it felt a bit overwhelming initially. Life gets seriously heady here.

Jumping in like most tourists, we start with the two primary attractions for visitors, the sights of historic Salvador and the lively beaches. Everyone goes early in a stay to Pelourinho, the core of the colonial city during its glory days and now a UNESCO-designated World Heritage site. Dignified though rather stern colonial structures surround the Terreiro de Jesus, including the seventeenth-century cathedral, a couple of smaller baroque churches, and a former school of medicine that now houses the Afro-Brazilian Museum.

Opposite the cathedral, a wide street leads to the Igreja de São Francisco (Church of St. Francis, the patron saint of the city). In the week we’re here, the avenue in front of the church slowly takes on a festive Christmas air, complete with an oversized Nativity scene and a giant effigy of a well-tanned Santa with cornrows in his white hair. The church itself, built in high baroque style between 1708 and 1723, echoes the grandness of scale in a more solemn way. The sugar barons of the wealthy city covered the intricately carved interior with more than one hundred kilograms of gold, enough to cast a sheen outside at night when the doors stand open.

Pelourinho brims with boutiques these days, like all tourist areas. Since this is our last stop on the trip, and we don’t have to haul our bags anywhere except home, we’re ready to load up on Christmas and other gifts. The fetching Mariana at Planet Bahia obliges us eagerly, getting us to try on almost everything in the shop over the course of several visits. She lived briefly in Los Angeles with her aunt and speaks English well, a rarity in Salvador. When she mentions once that she spends her days off at the beach, Bill asks which of the dozen possibilities she prefers. Mariana says, “Usually Flamengo, all my friends agree it’s the best,” which sounds like a solid recommendation to us. She finally sells us a bunch of colorful hair doodads for our daughter and granddaughters as well as a bright beaded necklace and earrings for Cheryl. Elsewhere in Pelourinho, we also pick up local music CDs, an Olodum T-shirt, jars of malagueta chiles, and some gemstone jewelry, mostly for presents.

A large crafts bazaar in the nearby Comércio district, the Mercado Modelo, offers little of interest to us, but farther along the shore to the north, the Feira de São Joaquim proves livelier and more remarkable. Almost a miniature city, it encompasses an earthy food market, stalls with kitchenware and baskets, shops selling a range of local merchandise, and snuggled behind it all, some shanty-town living quarters that make us wince. Our cabdriver, Wellington—who speaks no English but starts calling Cheryl “Hillary” after learning Bill’s name—insists on escorting us for security purposes. He takes us past stands packed with produce, including greens, okra, manioc and other knobby tubers, malagueta and Scotch bonnet chiles, sugarcane, and cashew fruits, which look like voluptuous calico bell peppers with a curved, green-brown nut on top. Butchers cut meat for customers, vendors hawk dried and fresh shrimp by the bushel, and a live frog the size of a guinea pig croaks at shoppers from a cage. A man brushes by us on the way to his car with a bellowing goat, feet tied together, in a sack slung over his shoulder.

Continuing north on the same taxi trip, we visit the Nosso Senhor do Bonfim church, a beloved eighteenth-century sanctuary associated with miracles. Outside, vendors sell us fitas, good-luck ribbons in a variety of colors that we tie around our wrists in the traditional fashion. Making our way inside through crowds of the faithful, we go to a back room where people seeking cures and giving thanks for them leave testaments in the form of photos and replicas of afflicted body parts.

From the divine to the worldly, after a few days of sightseeing and shopping we’re ready for some beach time. Barra beach, actually, has been omnipresent since our arrival, greeting us enthusiastically every time we step out on our hotel balconies. Tanners and swimmers congregate down the shore from us, while sporting types gather directly below our perches. Surfers, often in droves, ride the waves, and joggers dodge pedestrians on the sidewalk and cars on the street. From early morning until night, football teams compete constantly in the game Americans call soccer, always keeping the ball in play even when it bounds far into the sea. On occasion, it’s just a few guys and gals, using goalposts made of sticks, but now and then, full squads show up with regulation equipment, uniforms, and referees.

On our first weekend morning, trombones wake us at 7:15, when a festive parade passes along the beachfront. A jazz band leads the procession, followed by a truck loaded with beer, coconuts, and people blasting fireworks over the water. Bringing up the rear, a woman wearing a fancy headdress and sash guides scores of celebrants in identical white T-shirts toward a sandy destination somewhere ahead. Figuring the ruckus roused even the late-rising Mary, Cheryl calls their room to say, “Let’s hit the beach.”

On Mariana’s suggestion, we head to Flamengo, as far from Barra as public transportation goes. The bus trip along the coast takes an hour and a half, in part because street parades (different from the one that woke us) delay us twice. Other passengers, all quite friendly, regard us as oddities, particularly the two young girls engrossed with Mary; when they pantomime a question about whether she has children, Mary tries to say she has a cat but conveys instead that she is a cat, eliciting delighted laughter. An elderly gentleman in front of us, who once worked for Xerox and spent time at the company’s Connecticut headquarters, coaches his shy four-year-old grandson, Jaime, to tell Cheryl, “Hi. I love you.” When she responds in kind in English, the foreign language startles him, and he bursts into tears.

The palm-lined Flamengo and other nearby beaches look a little meager compared with Ipanema, but they feel more natural, largely secluded from urban and resort development. Most beachgoers settle in at tables with chairs and umbrellas provided free by dozens of barracas, food and drink stands. Following the routine, we pick a place close to the bus stop. Over the next several hours, a stream of waiters brings us limeades and cheese “crepes” on a stick, the specialty of our barraca. Scads of vendors stop by, selling everything hawked in Rio plus oysters on the half shell, fresh fish, blow-up Santas, coconut-shell planters with live flowers, cigarettes by the pack or individually (with a free light), and ashtrays decorated with crab shells. Jaime and his grandfather also stroll past us on a walk and the child waves at us cheerfully like we’re longtime neighbors.

The next day, Sunday, is the busiest of the week for the beaches. Multiple generations of families show up together, including grandparents in some cases with swimsuits as ample as ours. Wanting to try a different beach, we decide on Patamares, mainly to have lunch on the shore at Caranguejo da Dadá after our time in the sun. Today, in addition to other services, our barraca sets out inflatable plastic kiddie pools for toddlers, and a really enterprising vendor cooks fish and sausages on a commercial-size charcoal grill mounted to a three-wheel cart that he pushes through the sand.

The food at Caranguejo da Dadá is terrific, especially the bobó de camarão, made with jumbo shrimp, dried and grated fresh cassava, green peppers, onions, tomatoes, and coconut milk. The kitchen sautés the ingredients first in dendê and then stews them together until the flavors meld and the mixture thickens. It may not be the most appropriate dish for a hot summer day on the beach, but it’s as well crafted as anything else we see or purchase in Salvador.

Getting comfortable now with the surface charms of the city, we’re ready to delve deeper into its character and fervent energy. The key, many experts suggest, lies in religion, not so much in the Catholicism practiced in the venerable churches that we and other tourists visit, but in the Afro-Brazilian blend of beliefs called Candomblé. The creed prospers in many areas of the nation, and shares a heritage with other African-based religions in the New World, but Candomblé comes originally from Bahia and exerts its broadest overall influence in Salvador.

Our first glimpse of this side of the city comes on taxi trips that take us past a small lake near the center of town. A dozen colorful sculptures, each about twenty feet tall and grouped in a circle, rise from the water. Mistaking them initially from a distance as Christmas trees, like the one we saw in Rio, we finally realize they are orixás, the deified forces of nature worshipped in Candomblé. Slaves brought a devotion to them from their homelands, but the Church in Brazil firmly banned the ancient African religion. Rather than acquiescing, the slaves discovered they could secretly maintain their faith in the orixás by disguising them as Catholic saints and syncretizing those identities. Omolú, who possesses feared and respected power over disease, for example, became associated with Saint Lazarus. By praying to a saint for spiritual intercession, slaves could also appeal directly to their orixás for protection and help.

As the sculptures in the lake proclaim clearly, Candomblé is no longer an underground religion. Many of its adherents remain Catholic as well, but even more important in its impact on local culture and cuisine, a lot of nominal Catholics in Salvador also openly revere the orixás. Since the orixás love and respond with appreciation to song, music, dance, and offerings of food—rites employed in their worship for centuries—their enthusiasms spill over to the human population.

To gain any appreciable understanding of Candomblé, it seems important to us to experience a worship service. Dinner shows advertised in Pelourinho include a Candomblé presentation, but that won’t do. After asking around about opportunities to attend an authentic ceremony, the tourist office informs us there’s only one open to the public during our week in town. The four of us sign up eagerly, agreeing to a stipulation that we dress conservatively and don’t wear black, a color that offends many of the orixás. This requires Cheryl to go shopping for something other than the few black slacks she’s carrying. She looks at some beautiful white dresses typical of the area but reluctantly returns them to the rack as too extravagant to wear at home. In the end, she opts for a more versatile pair of soccer pants that can be rolled into capris.

A minibus picks us up at our hotel in the early evening, then stops at other places for ten additional guests from a variety of countries before delivering all of us to a white house in a humble residential neighborhood, where our guide, Carlos, joins us. Shortly before 9:00, we follow people from the neighborhood in filing down a narrow walkway on the side of the house to a covered outdoor terrace. This is the only section of the terreiro, or sacred space, where visitors are allowed. Earlier in the day in private areas of the terreiro, according to insiders, initiates of the order have sacrificed animals in a ritual butchering to prepare the favorite dishes of the orixá being honored tonight. They set the hallowed fare on an altar erected on the open-air terrace, and after we and other outsiders leave at the end of the public service, they will feast literally on the food of the gods.

Our vanload of guests troops onto the terrace and takes seats around the sides. Above us, a simple handmade chandelier, bare lightbulbs, and strips of white fabric hang from the corrugated-tin ceiling. The spiritual leader, or ialorixá, of this house of worship enters wearing white lace, with a flowing skirt and a puffy-sleeved blouse. A turban covers her head and beads dangle from her neck and wrists. A septuagenarian, we guess, she circles the space swinging an incense burner, the same kind Catholic priests use, and presents all of us in the room with a little manioc flour in our cupped hands, blowing more of it to the corners of the terrace.

Three other mature women assist the main priestess in conducting the rites that follow. A half-dozen younger female initiates also take an active but more subservient role, and three men in the same age range play drums and other simple percussion instruments. Tonight, they want to summon the spirit of Oxóssi, the orixá of the forest and the hunt. The musicians set a beat that’s known to appeal to the god, and the ladies dance in a circle in a distinctive shuffling, swaying style, to further entice him.

Men from the congregation gradually join the circle, and one by one, a number of them begin to shake and tremble, sometimes stumbling and falling in a trancelike state. Oxóssi has possessed them, joining the ceremony in their bodies. The elder women lead these men away, escorting them to another room behind a closed door. Later, after a couple of hours of drumming and dancing, the possessed men reappear in the attire of the orixá, wearing simple woodlandlike costumes and smoking big cigars. Now a link for the night between humankind and the gods, they mingle with the crowd, offering and receiving blessings.

Seeing the ceremony makes the connection between Candomblé and Salvador’s street music viscerally real to us. Two kinds of bands dominate the music scene, afoxés and blocos Afros. Both orient their year around the city’s Carnival, which is less formal and more robust in many ways than the same celebration in Rio. To prepare for the annual event, they rehearse publicly before live audiences, usually once a week and often in Pelourinho.

Afoxés basically perform a nonreligious rendition of Candomblé music, with a similar percussive rhythm and lyrics in a ritualized vein. The first afoxé joined Carnival in 1895, and a decade later, another of the groups broke the color barrier in the annual festivities, simply marching into the then segregated white parade. Today’s largest and best known afoxé is Filhos de Ghandy (Sons of Gandhi), formed in 1949 to honor the recently assassinated Indian leader and his spirit of peaceful resistance to oppression.

On a Sunday night, when the group rehearses, we happen to wander by their headquarters in Pelourinho. Hearing music, we hesitate outside, unsure whether it’s an open performance until a young man at the door motions us in. He leads us down a flight of stairs, crammed with people coming and going, and through a crowded bar out to a covered terrace where the band is playing. It looks much like the ceremonial space at the Candomblé service, down to the strips of fabric hanging from the ceiling, and the percussive beat and shuffle style of the dancing are nearly identical. When Carnival rolls around again, the Filhos will come out five thousand strong in Indian robes to celebrate this cadence and movement on the streets of the city.

Blocos Afros go several steps further in secularization. They maintain African roots as fully as the afoxés but adapt the ancient percussive rhythms to contemporary music. Dozens of them flourish in Salvador and some, especially Olodum (featured on Paul Simon’s The Rhythm of the Saints album), have achieved considerable commercial success and international recognition. One night in Pelourinho, we catch an Olodum performance at a fund-raising concert for a local food bank, paying an admission of a sack of sugar each. Twenty or so drummers, under the lead of a professional conductor, rock the concrete stage with such intensity you think it’s going to crack the floor. A young boy in front of us tries to keep up with the beat on an imaginary drum, banging it furiously with two empty water bottles. A Brazilian sports star, who we never identify, saunters in after us, signing autographs and shaking hands. He stands a head taller than anyone else, proudly displaying an extraordinary hairdo in synch with the vibrant music, a masterpiece of beads and woven rags in Day-Glo lime and fuchsia.

Strolling through Pelourinho on another evening near the end of our stay, we fall into step behind one of the newer blocos Afros, an all-woman ensemble called Dida that’s led by a former music director of Olodum. They move slowly down the street, playing as they go, toward a performance stage, stopping often and collecting an entourage of dancers and other enthusiastic followers. It’s a spontaneous party, bubbling with excitement. By now, we’re beginning to expect this kind of thing. It’s just another routine night in the hometown of Candomblé.

Our long-standing interest in Salvador derives, as you might guess, from the food, specifically the city’s great reputation for Creole cooking. In all bastions of Creole cuisine, the culinary tradition is closely tied to other aspects of the local culture, but we had no inkling of how in this case until now.

In the United States, people often take a narrow, parochial view of Creole food, associating it exclusively with New Orleans. This perspective even mutates into a fixation sometimes when a curious person tries to sort out clear and absolute differences between Creole and Cajun cooking in Louisiana. The two, in truth, are city and country cousins, related by virtue of belonging to the same extended family of New World Creole cuisines. Other branches of the family flourish in the French West Indies, parts of the Spanish Caribbean, and in Bahia. More distant cousins live around Veracruz, Mexico, and in the past, across various areas of the American South from Biloxi to Charleston. They generally share great-grandparents, one African and one southern European, an affection for New World ingredients employed in robust preparations, a coastal location that provides easy access to the bounty of the sea, and a temperate climate that encourages a taste for the spicy.

Oddly, few of the relatives know each other, and they tend to regard their cooking as unique. One night in Phoenix, during a culinary conference, we had dinner with a superb New Orleans chef at an authentic Mexican restaurant. He asked us about one of the menu items, huachinango a la veracruzana (snapper Veracruz), and we said it’s similar to the New Orleans favorite named courtbouillon. Laughing, he said, “That’s impossible. New Orleans cooks created courtbouillon strictly out of local inspiration and it remains unlike any other fish dish in the world.” He ordered the huachinango, recognized the affinities, and apologized for his presumption. Neither of us worked up the courage to tell him that French Caribbean islanders also claim exclusive rights to another variation of the same dish, which they even call courtbouillon themselves.

To us, this broad Creole food tradition is the signature cuisine of the Americas, and one of the most fascinating culinary syntheses on earth. Except for Bahia, we’ve visited all of the centers of Creole cooking in the past and have gone to many of them multiple times in recent decades. Salvador became gradually but steadily the biggest case of unfinished business on our food agenda. It is our main reason for visiting Brazil, to plop into place the final piece of a jigsaw puzzle that we’ve been carrying around for years; anything else we enjoy here is gravy.

The local cooking, it becomes clear early, resembles other Creole cuisines in many respects. Some of the common combinations of ingredients look almost identical to those elsewhere, particularly the rice with beans or peas and the shrimp with okra. The casquinha di siri here brings to mind the crab farci on Guadeloupe and Martinique. The most popular kind of molho de pimenta, mixing fiery chiles with vinegar, recalls Caribbean hot sauces, and occasionally you even see a molho in the familiar New Orleans Creole style, with tomatoes, bell peppers, and onions.

Not surprisingly, though, Bahian cuisine remains more purely African than other varieties of Creole cooking. That’s due in part to the prominent role played by dendê, an African ingredient virtually unknown in other Creole capitals; the palm oil adds an inimitable musky accent to loads of local dishes. You also have to credit the Candomblé influence again. The orixás brought many of their favorite dishes almost intact from Africa. They demanded a faithful execution of the original or at least tastes as similar as possible with available ingredients. Even today in terreiros, initiates hew to old recipes and preparation methods in the kitchen in an attempt to maintain continuity with former African versions of the fare. They perpetuate an allegiance to African foods and flavors within the Candomblé community, which for practical purposes means all of Salvador.

A direct Candomblé connection probably even exists to some of the best restaurant chefs of the city, mostly women of a traditional bent. Like Guadeloupe with its cuisine de mères, Salvador boasts its own comida de mãe, cooking defined and refined by mothers with boundless energy and saintly authority. Our most memorable meals come from their kitchens.

Alaíde da Conceição, respectfully known as the “Queen of the Beans,” prepares the first of these local feasts late one afternoon before she closes her tiny restaurant at sunset. Dona Alaíde began cooking with her mother almost a half century ago at a stand in the Comércio district, and remains at the stove at Alaíde do Feijão, located on a narrow side street in Pelourinho. When we arrive, two large groups have commandeered most of the tables and chairs, stringing them together for one office Christmas party occupying most of the inside space and another on the street, blocking all but the most determined traffic. The din reaches decibels unimagined in American restaurants, but it’s fun to watch the celebrations—our only option anyway, since conversation would be impossible.

Dona Alaíde specializes in feijoada and a locally popular rabada (oxtail stew). Our group gets a couple of plates of both, preceded by a cup of a simple but sublime bean soup. Unlike the feijoada completa we had in Rio, this one arrives with the major components already in the bowl. To the brown beans, rice, and various meats in the mixture, you can add condiments at hand on the table, including a relish of chopped tomatoes and onions in a saucer and dendê-sautéed farofa in a shaker jar. The rabada differs from the feijoada mainly in the flavor of the meat because it’s served with the same beans and rice. Both dishes thrill us. They couldn’t be more elemental, and rustically Bahian, but Dona Alaíde cooks them to such perfection that they taste transcendent.

A few blocks away, Dona Juana displays a similar command of local foods. She hails from the countryside herself and makes that evident in many ways. She christened her restaurant Uauá in honor of the small village where she grew up, and decorated the pretty second-story space in a rural theme, with faux adobe walls, laced with sticks and straw, that display farm tools, pottery, old photos, and folk art. The menu offers country meats as well, ranging from roast goat to pig and sheep innards.

The four of us stick with specialties from the sea. Mary and Jan share a heaping plate of fried fish and shrimp on skewers, filled out more than amply on the side with steamed vegetables, rice flecked with corn, and a yucca mash that we like more than they do. Our choice is a moqueca de peixe, a hearty fish stew that we ladle over rice and sprinkle to taste with farina. It brims with chunks of firm white fish, possibly cod or haddock, simmered with dendê and a mixture of chopped onion, bell pepper, and tomato in coconut milk. Big windows directly behind us open over a small Pelourinho plaza, bringing in the sounds of the streets to complement the aromas and tastes of the table.

Going from excellent to extraordinary, we have our best meal at Sorriso da Dadá. The name comes from the chef-owner’s dazzling smile, depicted in a number of portraits on the walls. Aldacir dos Santos, who goes by Dadá, moved to Salvador from the Bahia interior at the age of fourteen to work as a domestic servant. She liked to cook, so she opened a restaurant in her backyard, Tempero da Dadá, where diners dodged the drying laundry and scratching chickens. Gaining fame for her food—and some attention, too, for the underwear she hung on the line—Dadá branched out, expanding to several locations, including the beach restaurant we enjoyed at lunch on Sunday and this intimate, white-tablecloth operation in Pelourinho.

The menu encompasses a broad spectrum of Bahian favorites. You can start with acarajés, fried or steamed in banana leaves, fish fritters made with fresh or salt cod, and chowders of shellfish or octopus. All of us choose crab in the form of casquinha de siri, which the kitchen prepares with a little coconut milk and leaves soupy enough to absorb a dusting of farofa. After a few squeezes of lime and small dollops of molho de pimenta, it becomes one of the best dishes of our entire trip.

Entrée options vary from carne de sol and beef tenderloin with cheese sauce to a variety of moquecas (crab, shrimp, fish, lobster, and crawfish) and ensopadas (the same kind of stew without the palm oil). Mary and Jan select shrimp with vatapá paste, a luscious mating of tastes and textures. The two of us go for moqueca de siri mole, soft-shell crab in an exceptionally rich and complex coconut-milk-and-dendê broth redolent of cilantro. It boasts, like the rest of the dinner, a sophisticated balance and blending of flavors that proclaims pure and exalted Creole magic.

You don’t find that on every street corner unfortunately. The buffet breakfasts at our hotel are downright shameful, based largely on commercially packaged, poor-quality breads, pastries, and cereals. In a country that rightfully prides itself on sucos (fresh fruit juices), the versions here reek of a can and taste diluted as well. Nowhere else is nearly that bad. More often, typical of restaurants around the world, some dishes shine and others lack luster. That’s the case, for example, at the most elegant and upscale establishment in town, the internationally oriented Trapiche Adelaide. The kitchen excels with carne de sol in gnocchi and a seafood vatapá, but the shrimp with mustard and pineapple is too sweet and the molten chocolate cake lacks oomph.

Still, Salvador elates us with the best of its Creole food and its intense exuberance for life. The verve may wane occasionally, but it pops up again around the next bend, delighting us over and over gastronomically, musically, intellectually, and sensually. Arriving with high hopes, we leave in even higher spirits.

By Cheryl & Bill Jameson in "Around the World in 80 Dinners", Harper Collins, USA. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.