Up until a year ago I had never heard of something called a brigadeiro. Then Jamie Oliver just had to badmouth it (“a load of old shit,” he’d said in a TV interview, “fuckin’ horrible”) and caused something of a stir in Brazil.
Oh, Jamie. Turns out the brigadeiro is that country’s national dessert. You can denigrate your own cuisine all you want, but do it to someone else’s and… well, the Internet is always in need of a new whipping boy. Naturally this made me curious about the sweet treat. With only three ingredients, it sounded like a snap to make. And it was, though it took me a year to finally get around to it, which was how I came to spend the past Sunday with Eva, stirring a pot of treacly sludge consisting of condensed milk, unsweetened cocoa powder, and butter. We talked about everything except the stuff we were working on, because, really, we had no idea what to expect. Until the goo started to cling to the stirrer, at which point it struck us: “Chocolate yema!”
Spicy chocolate yema, actually; I had seen a feature on Mexican cuisine the day before and decided to throw chili powder into the mix. Now I’m no fan ofyema, so you have an idea what I thought of the brigadeiro as well. It was not exactly horrible, but maybe one too many caipirinhas had loosened up Chef Oliver’s tongue. The way I see it, the brigadeiro belongs to that class of sweets that one associates with childhood, like our own balikutsa, tira-tira, and the aforementioned yema; you remember them fondly but hardly go out of your way to eat — much less make — any. I guess the British chef could say the same of Spotted Dick and jam roly-poly. Did I hear someone snicker?
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