Exploring Brazil’s culinary heartland, Anthony Bourdain in Parts Unknown: “African culture saturates all corners of the society. This is especially true of the food.”
Late in Parts Unknown’s eighth season, Anthony Bourdain took in a part of Brazil that, despite Minas Gerais’ being Brazil’s fourth-largest state by land mass and being home to some 21 million people, rarely makes the news, let alone tourists’ to-do lists. Minas Gerais lies to the north-by-northeast of São Paulo, west of Espírito Santo, southeast of the Amazon, and northwest of Rio de Janeiro. It is also completely landlocked, as Bourdain notes in the program, which first aired on CNN in November 2016. This is inconvenient for those visitors who want to laze on a sunny beach in the tropics, and so the mere mention of the name Minas Gerais doesn’t exactly set hearts racing.
It is, however, thanks to Belo Horizonte, the state capital and Minas Gerais’ largest city, one of Brazil’s major urban and financial centres, and as we all know, nothing quite says, ’Man, I gotta go there!’ than ‘major urban financial centre.’
That, Bourdain noted at the time, and many of Brazil’s finest chefs, cooks, and culinary creators. The region is known for nurturing some of the finest chefs in the world. Minas Gerais is a hotbed — or hot pot, if you will — of fine food and Bourdain, ever curious, wanted to find out why. He got his answer early on: the family farm, coupled with traditional African cooking, is embedded in the culture. Traditional cooking revolves for the most part around slow-cooked stews using coal-or wood-fired ovens and cast-iron pans. Corn, cassava — mandioca brava in the local lingo — chicken and, especially, pork play a key role. Minas Gerais’ cuisine is renowned for its unique, particularly tasty flavour, and has become a signature calling card throughout other parts of Brazil. They say that to truly understand the Minas Gerais menu, you should learn at least three words: arroz, for rice, feijão, beans, and torresmo, pork rinds.
Oh, and Minas Gerais is also — in a wild scene toward the end of the hour — where Bourdain was almost shot in a drive-by shooting. Now that would have made a headline, though perhaps not the headline tourism officials were seeking.
So much for shooting the breeze, so to speak, in a street-side café over some fine covida mineira cooking. When shots rang out, Bourdain found himself flattened by director/cameraman Morgan Fallon and, close behind, assistant cameraman Josh Flannigan, not unlike the Secret Service agent played by Bruce Willis in The Last Boy Scout.
Later, in an essay for Medium, culled from his CNN Field Notes, Bourdain admitted his surprise at Fallon’s act of self-sacrifice, not because Fallon dropped his camera in the middle of filming a scene — ‘You had one job!’ — but because Fallon thought to shield Bourdain in the first place.
“Two car thieves,” Bourdain recalled, “struggling with the ignition, had allowed their stolen vehicle to drift into the curb in front of the cafe where we were shooting a scene … witnesses tried to drag them out of the car — at which point one of the thieves produced a weapon. … Somebody shouts “gun!” and the next thing I know Parts Unknown director Mo Fallon drops his camera, drags me to the floor, and covers me with his body. A split second later, assistant cameraman Josh Flannigan piles on. Mo has his back to the potential shooter, shielding me … After a tense moment the two were (wisely) allowed to flee the scene unmolested.”
Oh, dear.
Bourdain took the moment in stride, or in about as much a stride as one can be in after potentially becoming another crime statistic in Brazil.
“As I got up from the ground,” Bourdain recalled in Medium, “I think my first words to Mo were, ‘If your wife finds out about this, she is going to kill you.’ My crew is not the Secret Service. And I sure as s**t ain’t the president. This kind of behaviour, while flattering — and, well, frankly, heroic — is above and beyond the call of duty. I can — let’s face it — be replaced.”
But wait, there was more. Ramifications, ramifications.
“I returned to the table to continue talking about the cuisine of Minas Gerais. But in light of what had just transpired, I was thinking, ’Damn! Now I’ve gotta be nice to them.’ What does one do for people who risk their life for you? A fruit basket isn’t enough.”
True that — though perhaps not the about being replaced.
“I don’t want you to think Minas Gerais, a beautiful and mountainous agricultural area of Brazil, is a dangerous place,” Bourdain continued. “Brazil can be dangerous, for sure. It’s a country where the divide between rich and poor is striking and severe. But shit happens. It could have happened in New York or Dubuque. That it happened with us right there, cameras rolling, was one of the many flukes of the road. Travel long enough and you see stuff like that. A rule of the road, learned long ago, is that everything is fine. Until it isn’t.
“Do not let this brief moment discourage you from visiting Minas Gerais. It is beautiful. It is soulful, with a cuisine and a style all its own. It is unlike Rio or São Paulo or Salvador or Belém or anywhere else we’ve been in Brazil. It’s where so many of the cooks from the best restaurants in Brazil come from — and when you spend time there, you discover exactly why the best chefs in São Paulo brag that their cooks “come from Minas.” It is truly a ‘part unknown,’ in that it is relatively undiscovered by tourists. And the bats**t-crazy amazing art gallery, Inhotim—it’s spread throughout acres of jungle — is reason alone to visit.”
Ah yes, Inhotim.
Inhotim, a gallery of modern art tucked away in a massive jungle clearing miles away from, well, anything, is like a scene out of a James Bond villain’s eccentric — and expensive — hideout coupled with Gregory Peck’s jungle lair in The Boys from Brazil. It helps the visual effect, too, that the eccentric billionaire who created Inhotim from the ground up has even better hair than Bourdain. If only Eric Ripert had been Bourdain’s sidekick in Inhotim, they could have gone for the trifecta in perfect hair.
Mo Fallon is alive and well, by the way. It’s hard to keep a good man down. Bourdain lives on, in spirit if not in the temporal world.
Supplementary reading:
https://medium.com/parts-unknown/where-the-cooks-come-from-2e100d823428
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