Food note: seafood

One of the first things I had on arriving in Recife was argulha, needlefish. This is a small fish with a swordfish-like appendage on its nose (which you can see in the photo). The fish is gutted, flash-fried, and served whole as an appetizer with lime juice and salt. You eat these like corn on the cob, but some people eat almost all of the skeleton and others are more dainty about crunching all the little bones.

I've learned the word for scallops, vieira, because I'm allergic to them, but they don't seem to be served here very often, even in the frequent mixed seafood stews. Perhaps they are a colder-water creature.

One fish you do see quite often, both in salads and in hot dishes, is bacalhau, salt cod. Cod is a cold-water fish, from the North Atlantic. The Portuguese fishing fleet caught cod in the North Atlantic, salting it down for the trip home, and the Portuguese colonizers brought their taste for it to Brazil. There's a certain lack of economic logic to the popularity of bacalhau in Brazil; as Peter Robb points out (in A Death in Brazil, see earlier post), the farther it gets from its source, the more expensive it becomes, and why, if you're living in the tropical South Atlantic, do you need preserved fish? Moreover, cod is no longer a cheap, plentiful fish, even in the North Atlantic. Robb's explanation is that eating bacalhau is an indicator of class affiliation (or aspiration): poor people eat fresh fish, rich folks eat imported bacalhau, which also marks you as Portuguese rather than índio or black.