Tacacá

Belém's late-afternoon street soup, sour yellow tucupi poured scalding over tapioca gum and dried shrimp with jambu leaves that leave the whole mouth tingling

Origin: Belém, Pará, Brazil (the Amazon estuary)

From the journey of Cassava.

Tacacá is sold from tureens on street corners in Belém do Pará in the late afternoon, ladled into a gourd bowl called a cuia and drunk standing up without a spoon. It is hot, sour, savoury, and it makes the mouth buzz, and there is nothing else quite like it anywhere. Its base is the most remarkable thing in the whole cassava repertoire. When bitter cassava is grated and pressed, the liquid squeezed out is the poisonous fraction, the part every other tradition discards. The peoples of the Amazon estuary worked out that boiling it long and hard drives off the cyanide entirely, and that what remains, often fermented afterwards, is a thin golden broth of extraordinary savour. That is tucupi, and a regional cuisine was built on the waste stream of a detoxification process. The second element is jambu, Acmella oleracea, a leaf containing spilanthol, which produces a spreading numbness and tingling across the lips and tongue much like Sichuan pepper. The third is goma, tapioca starch slaked and cooked into a clear, slippery gel that sits at the bottom of the bowl. Dried shrimp, whole and unpeeled, go in on top. It is the everyday street form of a family that includes pato no tucupi, the duck poached in the same broth that is eaten at the Círio de Nazaré, Belém's enormous October procession. Both are indigenous in origin rather than Portuguese, and the Portuguese contribution amounts to the shrimp and the salt.

Ingredients

Broth

  • 1 litre tucupi (fermented cassava broth), from a bottle
  • 4 cloves garlic, crushed
  • 2 chicory or coriander sprigs (chicória do Pará if available)
  • 1 fresh hot chilli, pricked
  • 1 tsp salt, or to taste

Gum

  • 60 g tapioca starch (goma / polvilho doce)
  • 600 ml water, for the gum

To serve

  • 100 g large dried shrimp, whole
  • 1 large bunch jambu leaves (or watercress with a pinch of Sichuan pepper as an approximation)

Method

  1. Bring the tucupi to the boil in a large pan with the garlic, herbs, chilli, and salt. Simmer, uncovered, for twenty minutes, then taste for salt and keep it hot.
  2. Soak the dried shrimp in warm water for fifteen minutes, then drain. If they are very salty, change the water once.
  3. Blanch the jambu leaves in boiling salted water for two to three minutes, then drain.
  4. Slake the tapioca starch in 150 ml of the cold water until completely smooth with no lumps.
  5. Bring the remaining 450 ml water to the boil in a separate pan, take it off the heat, and pour in the slaked starch in a thin stream whilst whisking hard. Return to a low heat and cook, stirring, for two to three minutes until it turns from milky to clear and thickens to a loose, slippery gel.
  6. To assemble, spoon a generous ladle of the tapioca gum into the bottom of each bowl. Add the shrimp and the jambu.
  7. Pour the scalding tucupi over the top and serve at once, to be drunk from the bowl.

Notes

Bottled tucupi is sold by Brazilian grocers and online, usually frozen or in glass. There is no substitute for it and the dish cannot honestly be made without it. Never use the raw liquid pressed from cassava without prolonged boiling. That liquid is the toxic fraction, and turning it into tucupi means at least twenty minutes at a rolling boil, traditionally very much longer. Jambu is sold frozen by Brazilian grocers. The tingling is caused by spilanthol and is harmless. Use polvilho doce, sweet tapioca starch, not the sour kind, and not cassava flour. Cassava flour will not gel at all.

The Gastrographer

The Gastrographer

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Ingredient originTrade or transit route
Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control
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