The first song on the first album of Brazilian music I ever owned was a samba called “Vatapá.” It was composed by Dorival Caymmi, one of the greatest songwriters of the pre–bossa nova era and a one-man chamber of commerce for his hometown, Salvador. Caymmi put to music his love of Salvador’s beaches and fishermen, its churches and candomblé houses, its festivals and its women and, not least, its food. “Vatapá,” in fact, is a singable, danceable recipe for the tangy purée of the same name. Start with the cornmeal, the samba instructs, and the palm oil. Find a Bahian woman who knows how to stir and how to shake her hips. Add cashews, hot pepper, peanuts, shrimp, grated coconut, salt, ginger, and onions. Put the pot on the fire, and don’t stop stirring, don’t stop shaking.
That was my introduction to Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia, and 27 years later I still can’t think of a better one. Like New Orleans, Salvador is most famous for its food and its music, both of which have a distinctly African flavor. The city’s rich, spicy seafood dishes are so different from the barbecue and meat stews from elsewhere in Brazil that even other Brazilians consider them exotic. And the Bahians themselves are considered, if not exotic, the most festive and musical of their fellow countrymen. It was, in fact, freed slaves from Bahia who helped create the samba in the slums of Rio. Caymmi, now 91, was followed by a legion of Bahians—João Gilberto, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Gilberto Gil, Daniela Mercury, Virgínia Rodrigues, Margareth Menezes, and Carlinhos Brown, to name just a few—who made so much of the best música popular brasileira of the last half century, from the bossa nova and the rock- and folk-inflected Tropicália to axé, which mixes samba with reggae, salsa, and other rhythms from Africa and the Caribbean.
Music is so integral to life in Bahia that you don’t have to go looking for it. The thump of the surdo, the samba bass drum, all but follows you around. It drifts from the street into the gilded nave of the 18th-century Igreja de São Francisco, gradually displacing a Gregorian chant. The twang of the one-string berimbau floats out the windows of the capoeira academies, where it sets the tempo for the dance-fight’s spinning kicks and cartwheels. Percussion bands like the all-female Didá pound out feverish sambas in the cobblestone streets of the heart of the Old City, Pelourinho. Singers and guitarists amble through the música popular canon at the bar-restaurant Cantina da Lua, where, for the price of a beer, you can sit at an outdoor table, listen to the music, and gaze at the polychrome façades and the Baroque, Rococo, and neoclassical churches of the Terreiro de Jesus, for my money the most beautiful square in South America.
But nowhere in Bahia are music and food more inseparable than in candomblé, the Afro-Brazilian religion that runs through all levels of Bahian culture. The old West African spirits—orixás—are each summoned with their own drumbeats, chants, and songs and offered their favorite dishes. In the Mercado Modelo, Salvador’s big crafts market, stalls sell candomblé drums, statuettes of orixás, and other related articles. At one stall, a cheerful little man called Chocolate volunteers that my orixá is Ogum, the warrior spirit. (Every person is designated a son or daughter of one or more orixás, who reflect one’s true nature and set one’s path in life.) Chocolate says he can see Ogum in my manner, and he confirms his assessment by looking up my birth date in a candomblé book. At another stall, a man named José Carlos says just as confidently that I’m a son of Oxalá, the supreme spirit. What do I know? More important, what do they eat? According to a flyer provided by José Carlos, Oxalá likes coconut (good), Ogum cashews (excellent). There are no-nos as well. For instance, children of Oxalá should not drink cachaça, the Brazilian firewater.
I violate that rule right after leaving the market. At Paraíso Tropical, a restaurant in the hilly neighborhood of Cabula, I order a caipirinha, and on Oxalá’s day, Friday. There’s a plate of sugarcane sticks on the table, soon joined by a bowl of shrimp bisque and a serving of shredded crabmeat.
Paraíso Tropical’s rustic simplicity belies the fact that it serves highly sophisticated Bahian cuisine. Plastic tables and chairs line a narrow veranda with a red-tile roof overlooking a slope dense with mango, banana, and cacao trees. Down near the kitchen are coops of chickens and roosters that periodically raise a mighty racket. Then there’s the chatter of Beto Pimentel, the restaurant’s hyperactive owner. The moment I arrive with my Brazilian wife and in-laws, Beto launches into a monologue about having 23 children—22 of them male—and having been widowed four times. “She’s my next victim!” he crows, pointing to his current wife, a pretty, much younger woman (Beto is 61), who reacts with a small, forbearing smile.
For a stand-up comedian, Beto makes a great chef. He serves a version of Bahian food that is both lighter and more complex than most. Traditional Bahian moquecas (fish and seafood stews), cooked with tomatoes, onions, peppers, and generous amounts of coconut milk and the oil of the dendê palm nut, are too heavy for some first-time diners, and even Bahians won’t eat them every day. Beto dials back the standard ingredients and throws in others that not only add new flavors but also aid digestion: fruit pulp, orange and sweet-lime leaves, canary and citronella grasses, green cashews, hearts of palm fresh off the tree. Instead of large doses of oil, he uses the fruit of the dendê palm; instead of a torrent of coconut milk, the meat of green coconuts.
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