Feijoada

Feijoada

Brazilian-style feijoada with common side dishes
Type	Stew
Place of origin	Portugal
Main ingredients	beans, beef, pork
Variations	typ

Feijoada (Portuguese pronunciation: [fejʒuˈadɐ]) is a stew of beans with beef and pork of portuguese origin. It is also typically cooked in Macau, Angola, Cape Verde, Mozambique, Goa, India and Brazil, where it is also considered a national dish. However, the recipe differs slightly from one country to another.

The name comes from feijão, Portuguese for "beans".

The basic ingredients of feijoada are beans with fresh pork or beef. In Brazil, it is usually made with black beans; in the northeast (Bahia), it is generally prepared with kidney beans (Feijoada à Brasileira), and includes other vegetables such as tomatoes, carrots, and cabbage. The stew is best prepared over low heat in a thick clay pot.

It is usually served with rice and assorted sausages, such as chouriço, morcela (blood sausage), farinheira, and others, which may or may not be cooked in the stew.

The practice of cooking a meat (pork) stew with vegetables that gave origin to the feijoada from the Minho Province in Northern Portugal is a millenary Mediterranean tradition that can be traced back to the period when the Romans colonized Iberia. Roman soldiers would bring this habit to every Latin settlement, i.e., all of the provinces of Romania, the Vulgar Latin speaking area of Europe (not to be confused with the modern country solely), and this heritage is the source of many national and regional dishes of today's Europe, such as the French cassoulet, the Milanese cassoeula from Lombardy, Italy, the Romanian fasole cu cârnați, the fabada asturiana from Northwestern Spain, near Portugal, and the also Spanish cocido madrileño and olla podrida, not to mention non-Romanic regions with similar traditions that might be derived from this millennial Roman soldiers' dish like the Polish tsholem and golonka.