About a year and a half ago, while attending a culinary conference in Spain, I overheard chef Ferran Adrià saying that in his view the great undiscovered culinary planet was the Amazon. Adrià had heard about a chef in Brazil, he said, who was doing great things with some of the strangest ingredients on earth. A kind of “electric cress” that sent shock waves through your mouth. A huge fish with a meaty rib cage that you nibbled, as though it were pork spareribs. Fruits from the depths of the jungle that were so bizarre they might have been genetically manipulated by aliens.

My curiosity piqued, I began reading up on the region, eventually discovering that Brazil is home not just to one national cuisine but to numerous culinary styles, each with its own personality. I made plans to visit São Paulo, the Manhattan of Brazil, a melting-pot metropolis of 10 million where Japanese and Italian and Lebanese cuisines mingle with local food traditions to form a dazzling culinary kaleidoscope. It was there that I learned about the renaissance currently transforming the landscape of Brazilian restaurant food, with young chefs like Alex Atala and Bel Coelho leading the way.

If one of the poles of the new Brazilian cooking is São Paulo, Atala and Coelho told me, the other is Belém—the capital of the state of Pará and one of the two major cities of the Brazilian Amazon (the other is Manaus). It turns out that the main mover and shaker on the Belém food scene—as well as the main purveyor of Amazonian ingredients to the avant-garde chefs of Rio and São Paulo—is the same chef whose work Adrià had praised: Paulo Martins, of the restaurant Lá em Casa.

Less than 100 miles from the equator, Belém seems to stand guard at the gaping mouth of a river system that stretches 4,000 miles into the interior, its tentacles reaching into Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru. And when it comes to cooking, there’s a lot to be said for living on the edge of one the world’s largest forest ecosystems. Consider that, in addition to containing a fifth of all the world’s fresh water, the Amazon is home to more than 1,500 species of freshwater fish. The region is believed to harbor more than 1,000 species of edible fruit, at least two dozen of which, wildly exotic though they may seem to non-Amazonians, are everyday fare at the fruit stalls and breakfast buffets of Belém.

So it was that I found myself launched into the tropical sauna of Belém’s broiling streets, heading for an encounter with the man who has done more than anyone to get Brazilians talking about the food culture of their northern provinces. Born into an important Belém family (his great-grandfather was governor of the state of Pará), Paulo Martins trained as an architect but left the profession in 1978 to dedicate himself to the restaurant he had opened with his mother, Anna Maria, in their home in the city’s Nazaré district. A big, bluff, genial man with a salt-and-pepper beard and gleaming black eyes, Martins sat me down at a table in the shade of the terrace at Lá em Casa (it means something like “back home”) and gave me a crash course in the flavors and dishes that make up his culinary universe.

The traditional gastronomy of Pará has three pillars, he explained: manioc root, or cassava; river fish; and jungle fruit. Its principal seasonings are cheiro verde, literally “green-smell,” a local variety of cilantro; chicória, a fleshy variant of chicory; and a small-leaved, highly pungent basil called alfavaca. (These are complemented by pimenta de cheiro, a small yellow chile used whole to give fragrance or crushed and macerated for a hot sauce.)

At lunchtime, Martins brought out a succession of dishes, each more striking than the last. We began with caruru paraense, a kind of dry fricassee of shrimp and okra sautéed with garlic, onion, black pepper, dendê oil, and manioc flour, then moved on to a salad of shredded river crab meat in its shell, refreshingly flavored with garlic, chopped onion, and those three herbs. After this came tambaqui—the fish with the succulent ribs—done on the grill, superbly meaty, and accompanied by a generous helping of sludgy maniçoba, an ancient dish of tribal origin for which manioc leaves are crushed and simmered for seven days and seven nights, and then topped with bacon, sausage, and other types of smoked pork.

Then came the main attraction: pato no tucupi—a signature dish not just of the restaurant, but of Pará cuisine as a whole. To make it, Martins simmers duck, the chicken of the Amazon, in tucupi with generous amounts of jambu—the “electric cress” Adrià had mentioned. I gingerly took a mouthful and chewed carefully. At first nothing happened, though the vegetable, in its misolike sauce, tasted fine and juicy. Then I began to feel a prickle on my lips, followed by a peculiar numbing sensation that flooded my mouth, making my salivary glands work overtime. I must have yelped with surprise, because the people at the next table looked over to see what was up. Martins laughed uproariously and then brought me a plate of Amazon fruit ice creams to soothe my tingling mouth.

“Cozinha paraense,” the cooking of Pará, Martins explained, is essentially a legacy of the indigenous tribes that originally inhabited the lower reaches of the Amazon before being pushed into the interior by the threat of disease and slavery. Despite the colonization of the region from the 16th to the 18th centuries by the Portuguese, the indigenous cuisine survived almost intact. Cozinha paraense is often referred to as the most authentically Brazilian of all the regional cozinhas, precisely because it bears so few traces of outside influence.

For centuries, this cuisine was unknown to international gastronomy, practiced only by locals and mysterious even to other Brazilians. It was true that during the Círio de Nazaré, the city’s great celebration in honor of Our Lady of Nazareth, practically every household in Belém still served regional dishes like maniçoba and pato no tucupi. And açaí, a berrylike jungle fruit whipped into a nourishing purple purée, was still consumed in huge amounts. But other than that and tacacá, a hot soup of tucupi with dried prawns, tapioca gum, and jambu leaves, which was still sold at street stalls by local women in frilly white smocks, Pará cooking had pretty much slipped off the Brazilian public’s radar.

The restaurant that Anna Maria and Paulo Martins opened in 1972 would begin to change all that. Dona Anna had always been a skilled and dedicated home cook, as had her mother and grandmother before her. She and her husband, Paulo’s father, loved to eat out in the few good restaurants the city knew in the 1960s, but she could never understand why there was no place that specialized in the rich and varied cooking of the region. As for her son, he may have been an architect by training, but what really fascinated him was food. “I grew up helping Dona Anna—alongside the pots and pans, that is, not meddling with them. I didn’t want just to be a builder; I needed to imagine new forms, to do things differently. When I resolved to leave the field of architecture once and for all and to devote myself to the restaurant, I felt the need to keep on creating.”

Not content to stick to his mother’s recipes, Martins began to investigate the wonderful world of ingredients like jambu, tucupi, manioc flour, castanha-do-Pará (we know it as the Brazil nut), river fish like the pirarucu, which grows up to ten feet long, and the constellation of jungle fruits with their fabulous aromas. In Martins’s hands, jambu, traditionally assigned a supporting role, took center stage in creations like jambu pesto and arroz de jambu—jambu rice, now virtually a regional dish in its own right. Tucupi was whipped into foams and soufflés, and fruits perfumed ice creams and sweetmeats and found their way into pungent sauces for meat and fish.

Martins spent the 1980s working away quietly, far from fashionable culinary circles. But after he’d made a handful of visits to Rio and São Paulo, to introduce people in the restaurant world to the ingredients Pará had to offer, a stream of chefs began making their way to his door. Claude Troisgros, whose restaurant in Rio was one of the first to use indigenous Brazilian ingredients in a contemporary context, became a regular visitor, as did Alex Atala, currently riding high with his São Paulo restaurant D.O.M., widely regarded as the most innovative in Brazil. Atala is a self-proclaimed Amazon addict who makes the trip north at least three times a year, carrying home a suitcase full of fish and fruit, tucupi and jambu, every time.

Those of us who don’t live in Brazil unfortunately aren’t likely to see any of these oddities soon. Though Adrià is reported to be experimenting with tucupi and tapioca, and Andoni Luis Aduriz, of Mugaritz, in San Sebastián, uses jambu buds as part of a radical mixed salad, few other chefs outside Brazil are experimenting with these exotic ingredients. And customs regulations and local bureaucracy will continue to complicate the trading of the unconventional merchandise.

The Mercado Ver-o-Peso, Belém’s main produce market, serves as a powerful reminder of just how much we’re missing. Founded by the Portuguese in 1688, it’s housed in a splendid building right beside the coffee-colored waters of the Rio Guajará tributary. In the fish section, where Martins tells me he once counted 97 different species, I gape like a tourist at the baskets of still-twitching river shrimp; the grotesque armored tamuata, which skulks in thick mud at the water’s edge; and the immense filhote (“little son”), a catfish relative with a fine-flavored flesh that Martins uses in the fish stew known as caldeirada.

At a fruit stall run by a tiny lady with a bright smile and sunbaked skin, I’m treated to an impromptu tasting that includes a kind of cape gooseberry that grows on river banks (camapu); a neon-pink thing with the shape of a fig and the crunchy white flesh of an unripe melon (jambo, no relation to jambu); and a hard-skinned, light brown ball with a sour yellowish pulp (uxi—“very popular with monkeys,” says Martins). Not all this stuff is easy on the palate: I can see why big-city chefs favor cupuaçu and bacuri, with their agreeable perfumes and luscious honeyed sweetness, for example, over the weirdly savory, almost cheeselike murici.

As we approach the vegetable section, Martins’s cellphone rings for probably the tenth time that morning. It is Dominique Oudin, chef at the Méridien hotel in Rio, with an urgent request for a box of regional products. If it’s put on the afternoon flight, Martins figures, it should be there in time for dinner.

He sighs, not unhappily. Over the years, he has become a kind of unofficial promoter of ingredients to the rest of Brazil. Rather than resenting the work involved, though, he sees all the new interest as confirmation that, after 25 years of devoting himself to the strange and wonderful culinary wonders available right outside his back door, his efforts are finally bearing fruit.

Amazon Food Glossary

Açaí

The iron-rich fruit of the açaí palm, native to the Amazon. Used in desserts and as an accompaniment to grilled fish.

Alfavaca

A highly pungent, basil-like plant with small leaves.

Bacuri

A thick-skinned fruit, golden yellow in color, with a viscous, pleasantly tart white flesh.

Buriti

A fruit with a dark scaly skin, used in drinks, desserts, and ice creams.

Chicória

The leaves of this plant, a relative of chicory, are used as a kitchen herb.

Cupuaçu

The king of the jungle fruits, this large, melon-shaped, dusty-brown fruit is a sister of Theobroma cacao, which gives us chocolate. Its flesh is wonderfully sweet and aromatic.

Guarana

A small tree whose orange-red fruit has become popular worldwide in the form of an energy drink.

Jambu

Spilanthes oleracea, known in English as “Pará cress,” “toothache plant,” or “electric cress”; this semiwild vegetable is an essential element of Amazonian cuisine. The substance that causes its numbing effect in the mouth is spilanthol.

Maniçoba

A popular paraense dish in which the leaves of the manioc plant are crushed and simmered for seven days (to remove poisonous hydrocyanic acid) and then cooked with bacon, sausage and other types of smoked pork.

Maracujá

The Amazonian name for passion fruit; native to Brazil.

Pirarucu

A giant freshwater fish often sold in dried form and known as the “salt cod of Brazil,” this is the main ingredient of the dish pirarucu de casaca.

Pupunha

A palm fruit with a fibrous yellow flesh that is generally eaten cooked rather than raw.

Tacacá

A Pará dish of tucupi,jambu , dried prawns, and tapioca gum that is popular in Belém and Manaus. By tradition, tacacá is sold in the streets by specialist tacacazeiras.

Tambaqui

An Amazonian fish that feeds mainly on fruit and seeds that fall into the river. Its ribs are often barbecued.

Tamuata

A freshwater fish with a distinctive armored exterior.

Tapioca

The starch grains obtained from the manioc root, sold either in granular form or as flour (farinha de tapioca).

Tucunaré

The peacock bass; a large species that is equally prized by anglers and cooks.

Tucupi

The yellow liquid extracted from the manioc root as a by-product of flour manufacture. Toxic when raw, it is boiled to remove hydrocyanic acid. Seasoned with salt, alfavaca, and chicória, it is much used in local cooking.

—P.R.