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Seasoning, Time and Authenticity in Manuel Querino’s A Arte Culinária na Bahia

2019; Brepols; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1484/j.food.5.121081

2034-2101

Ana Margarida Dias Martins,

Urban and sociocultural dynamics

This article addresses contested and constructed ideas about Afro-Bahian food by focusing on the cookbook A Arte Culinária na Bahia (2011 [1928]), by Afro-Brazilian historian and black African leader Manuel Raymundo Querino (1851-1923). Through a comparative exercise with Casa-Grande e Senzala (2002 [1933]) by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre (1900-87), it is argued that Querino’s publication challenges central ideologies of racial and cultural exceptionality in Brazil through its exploration of the trope of seasoning, which extends in this book to the temporal preservation of the nation’s ethnic diversity and the physical wellbeing of the Portuguese in the tropics. It will be argued that, by treating (white European) bodies, alongside food, as sites of transformation via African tempering, Querino’s cookbook embeds its discourse of seasoning in Brazilian debates on national identity, of Brazil as colonized and Portugal as colonizer, suggesting that the Portuguese were brought into time - they were ripened, or improved, even corrected - through eating Afro-Bahian delicacies.