Sweet and Salt

Rio de Janeiro - When we live inside a culture we take its mental model of the world for granted, dividing the world up into the categories for which it was explicit language, with no idea that different words might give us different tools with which to analyze our daily life. When we move into another culture, with a different language, we begin to get an inkling of the fungibility, or lack of it, of our categories, of our mental mappings. Some concepts have direct one-to-one correspondences (or seem to, at least) – man, woman, hot, cold, tall, short, love, hate. Other concepts are more difficult, with a translation calling upon a spectrum of words in the other language, or, even worse, a whole sentence-worth of explanation.

One of the dualities which seems fundamental to Brazilian culture (and which is evidently not present for American culture in general), is that of sweet and salt. At a basic level, what we call "fresh" and "salt" water, are, in Portuguese "doce" and "salgada" (sweet and salt). But in a more general way, sweet and salt are the conceptual categories into which almost all of Brazilian food is divided. If you are at the beach (or in a traffic jam) the Biscoitos Globo which you buy from the vendor (little airy confections made from manioc starch), come in two flavors – sweet or salty, with the sweet sold in a red paper bag, and the salty in a green one. Even this concept of "biscoito" betrays a difference in the Brazilian classification of food, since the foods brought together by "biscoito" (and divided into sweet or salt), fall in English into different and unrelated categories (a sweet "biscoito" is a "cookie", and a salty "biscoito" is a "snack").

"Salgados" (salty things) and "salgadinhos" (little salty things) don't quite make it into the category of what you might call "real food," but they are what you fill in the cracks with when you are between meals and can't sit down to the table. "Salgados" include a variety of Brazilian items – joelhos (literally, "knees"), "coxinhas" (thighs), pão de queijo, as well as Arabic items which have joined the culinary pantheon here – esfihas, kibes, and so forth. "Salgadinhos" are even saltier and less healthy for you – potato chips, peanuts, cashews, etc.

"Doces" (sweets) include not only what Americans might call sweets (hard candy, known as "balas" in Brazil), but the whole spectrum of foods which are sweet, including anything beginning "doce de…." – doce de leite, de abobora (squash), de jaca (jackfruit), de cajú (cashew), de cupuaçu, de amendoim (peanut), all of the treats brought by the Portuguese (my favorite is "toucinho do céu" or "lard of heaven"), and the various treats sold by vendors on the street – brigadeiros, mother-in-law eyes, cuzcuz, churros, etc.

Sweet and salty do not only apply to these sinful items (epitomized by a stand in the Presidente Vargas subway station in Rio de Janeiro, with its sign in huge letters advertising "SALGADOS DOCES," but also to more substantial food consumed at home, whether breakfast, lunch or dinner. Americans tend to mix salt and sweet shamelessly at breakfast (think of a nice beginning to the day with bacon, eggs, and pancakes with maple syrup), but my wife Deborah had only ever eaten "salgados" at breakfast along with her coffee – no sweet breakfast cereal, no donuts (or the Brazilian equivalent, "sonhos" (dreams).

I started to wonder about the cultural roots of the sweet/salty duality when, having bought a new wooden spoon, I was informed by Deborah that from now on the new spoon would be only used for "doces," as it would take on the aromas of "salgados" if it were used for anything but sweets. A few more questions elicited the information that she had grown up in a family with different dishes and implements for sweet and salty (I already knew that nobody in the family had eaten pork for at least four generations, that is, within living memory). The family did not self-identify as Jewish (most were Protestant), but had strong roots in Recife, Pernambuco, where in the seventeenth century the religious freedom under the government of the Dutch had allowed the many "cristãos novos" (New Christians, Jews who had converted under pressure after 1492), to publicly assert their Jewish identities after almost 150 years of continuing Judaic practices secretly. (The defeat of the Dutch by the Portuguese put an end to this brief flowering of religious liberty in Latin America).

It seemed reasonable to assume that, at least for this Brazilian family (with its matriarchs named Ruth, Rachel, Sarah, Rebecca, and many Deborahs, including mine), the Judaic division of foods into "meat" and "milk" had been transmuted into "salt" and "sweet", especially when one realizes that in a tropical Northeast, prior to refrigeration, salting meat and making sweets (the most important of which is with milk) were two important technologies of preserving food. Is it possible that the conceptual division of "salt" and "sweet" in Brazil in general comes from the cultural importance of the New Christians in the colonization of almost five hundred years ago? This is a question which bears further investigation.

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