When Camila Vargas talks about her mother, the ‘courageous’ Maria do Carmo Vargas Souza, tears prick at her eyes and goosebumps run all up her arms. Camila was the ‘wild one’ of six sisters, all of whom joined the family cooking business, Little Piece of Bahia, which Maria established back home in Brazil in 1989. All except Camila.
She had never cooked a day in her life, and had no intention of doing so either. While her sisters were all drawn to the family’s kitchen, growing up in Salvador, the capital of the state of Bahia, north of Rio and Sao Paulo, she was not. Instead, she went to London to study economics.
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I ask her why she was the only one of the sisters to leave home, and she gestures to the stall behind us that she opened here in the Arndale Food Market just a couple of weeks ago, with capoeira demonstrations, resplendent in full Brazilian national dress. All roads have lead here, she explains.
When Maria was diagnosed with cancer during lockdown, it changed everything. She insisted that Camila finally learn to cook. It was non-negotiable.
“She said ‘you need to follow me’,” Camila says. “I said to her ‘no, I have my job’. She just said ‘but it’s your turn’.” And so, through the agony of her treatment, she taught Camila everything she knew, just like she had to her sisters - every recipe, every method - all via Facetime, ailing and five thousand miles away.
“She was in treatment, and I would cry,” she says. “It was lockdown, I was in London. I could not go to her. So I said ‘OK, I will do it’. She was a very strong woman.”
Sometimes she would struggle with the lessons. Maria would console her. “She would say ‘Listen, this is within you. You are black woman. You know how to do this’,” Camila says, and tears start to gather at the corners of her eyes, and the goosebumps come. “She’d say ‘It is there somewhere. You will feel it’.”
Maria eventually succumbed to her illness. But her recipes endure as her legacy. They hark back to Brazil’s colonial past, the food that would sustain the slaves taken thousands of miles away from Africa to South America by Portuguese traders from as early as the 1400s.
“‘Why don’t you have cookbooks?!’,” a frustrated Camila would yell at her mother. “And she would say ‘Excuse me! Slaves didn’t know how to write!’
“We cook from our ancestors. So it’s a mix of Portuguese and African. There’s no water, only coconut milk, there’s plantain, jackfruit, palm oil from Nigeria. You can be the best chef in the world, but you cannot cook this food. This food is inheritance.”
We get the wrong idea about what Brazilian food is, she explains. “It is so misrepresented. When you go to any Brazilian restaurant, people think ‘steak’. Steak is not Brazilian food. It is Argentinian.”
Some Bahian dishes are, in fact, straight up Nigerian. Acarajé, for example, are fritters made from black eyed peas, and then stuffed with a paste of ground smoked prawns, peanuts, cashews, coconut and other wonderful things and fried in palm oil. In Yoruba, they’re called akara, and it is pretty much the same dish exactly.
“Fun fact, the first recorded businesswoman in all of Brazil, she sold Akara on the roads where the slaves would be working,” she says. “Jé, in Yoruba, means ‘eat’, so that’s why it became acarajé. It’s made of beans so it’s very filling. Nigerian people come here and see this and they say ‘Hey! This is our food!’ and I say ‘No, no, no, hold on…” She laughs mischievously. “We share it.”
Even the Brazilian national dish, feijoada, which of course Camila serves, is traced back to slavery. A stew of beans, it is traditionally made with off-cuts - ears, tails, feet of cows and pigs - as well as sausage, ribs, sometimes bacon.
“It uses what was left for the slaves,” she says. “Very filling. Tails, feet, cow’s legs. The leftovers. And then it became elevated and now it’s the national dish. There’s a light version, which people ask for. Because if you have the heavy version, it’s sleeping time!”
After Camila lost her mother, the work truly began. She started cooking Brazilian food in her kitchen under the family name, and got herself on WhatsApp. From her base in Hackney, she started selling and delivering her dishes all over London, first to the Brazilian communities across the city, and then to everyone else through word of mouth. Soon, she had five drivers delivering for her, everywhere from Shoreditch in the east to Kensal Rise in the west.
But, after 15 years in London, she had tired of it. It was busy and stressful, and she had not long lost her mother. She moved to Norland, near Sowerby Bridge, on a whim. “I couldn’t cope anymore with London, so this was a fresh start,” she says. “I needed to be peaceful.”
She still cooks huge numbers of dishes every week - from feijoada to Moqueca De Camarão, a luxurious prawn stew - freezing them and sending them overnight via DHL all over the country.
“I have people come from Brazil and say ‘I’ve never eaten food like this before, the way this is made’,” she says. “It is legacy. If you’d told me five years ago I would be cooking, I’d be like ‘Me? No, I don’t know how to cook!’ But now I am happy.”
It’s not just the recipes, but the cooking methods that trace all the way back home. I ordered the last portion of Carne de Sol last week, ‘sun-dried meat’, clumsily translated, but it’s beef cured in salt, which in the days before refrigeration would stop it going bad.
It gives this long prepared but quickly-cooked dish a deep seasoning, and is served with red onions still with a little bite to them, all heaped onto mashed cassava that’s as smooth as silk, stirred through with butter and Brazilian cheese. Think deconstructed cheesesteak, and you’re somewhere in the ballpark.
What Camila makes is so much more than the dish in front of you. It’s determination, passion, heartbreak, history and struggle, a woman’s life, her purpose, served up in a cardboard container. And at that time, at a stall in a canteen in a shopping centre, there’s not a place I’d rather have been nor a dish I’d have rather been eating in this city. This is soul food indeed. I didn’t want it to end.
Little Piece of Bahia, 49 High St, Manchester M4 3AH
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