Baião de Dois

Ceará's rice and cowpeas cooked in one pot, the rice in the beans' own broth, finished with queijo coalho and the clarified butter of the backlands

Origin: Fortaleza & the Sertão of Ceará

From the journey of Cowpea.

Baião de dois is the dish of Ceará, and its method comes from the dry backlands of the Brazilian Northeast, the sertão, where water was too precious to waste. The cowpeas, feijão-de-corda, are boiled first, and the rice is then cooked in their broth, so that the two come to the table as one; the pot is finished with cubes of queijo coalho, the firm, squeaky curd cheese of the region, which half melts in the heat, and a spoonful of manteiga da terra, the clarified butter of the backlands, with coriander and spring onion. In season the beans are used fresh from the pod as feijão-verde, which cook in minutes and are preferred. Cooks in Ceará often keep the dish meatless, whilst elsewhere in the Northeast carne de sol, the salted, sun-cured beef, or smoked sausage goes in. The folklorist Gustavo Barroso recorded the dish in 1940, and ten years later 'Baião de Dois', a song by Humberto Teixeira, himself from Ceará, and Luiz Gonzaga, the king of the baião, the music and dance of the Northeast, helped carry its name to the rest of the country. The cowpea had reached Brazil from Africa in the sixteenth century by way of Bahia, and it was being grown in Piauí, next door to Ceará, by 1697. The rice has a history of its own. Brazil's first rice was red, and when the Portuguese banned the red rice of Maranhão in 1772 to favour white rice for export, it survived in the backlands, where it is still grown.

Ingredients

Beans

  • 300 g dried cowpeas (feijão-de-corda or black-eyed peas), soaked for 4 hours, or 500 g fresh shelled cowpeas (feijão-verde)
  • 1 bay leaf

Rice

  • 300 g long-grain white rice, rinsed, or red rice
  • 3 tbsp manteiga da terra (manteiga de garrafa), or ghee
  • 100 g smoked bacon, diced (optional)
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 3 garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 small green pepper, diced (optional)
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste

To Finish

  • 250 g queijo coalho, cut into 1.5 cm cubes, or halloumi
  • 3 tbsp chopped coriander
  • 3 spring onions, chopped

Method

  1. Drain the soaked cowpeas and simmer them with the bay leaf in 1.5 litres of water for 30 to 40 minutes, until just tender. (Fresh feijão-verde needs only 10 to 15 minutes.) Drain, keeping the broth; you need about 700 ml.
  2. In a heavy pan, melt 2 tablespoons of the butter and fry the bacon, if using, until it colours. Add the onion, garlic, and green pepper and cook for 5 minutes until soft.
  3. Add the rice and stir for 2 minutes to coat it in the fat.
  4. Add the beans and 700 ml of the hot bean broth, with the salt. Bring to the boil, cover, and cook on a low heat for 15 to 18 minutes, until the rice is tender and the liquid absorbed.
  5. Fold in the cheese, the remaining butter, the coriander, and the spring onions. Cover and leave for 5 minutes so that the cheese softens and half melts.
  6. Serve at once.

Notes

Queijo coalho is sold in Brazilian grocers; halloumi is the closest substitute and behaves in the same way in heat. Manteiga de garrafa, clarified butter kept liquid in bottles, is the traditional fat of the sertão. Ghee is a fair stand-in.

The Gastrographer

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