Vegetarian recipes from Brazil

The meatless Brazilian base is rice and beans eaten daily, plus cassava flour that dries out and binds the plate. To that add red palm oil and coconut milk, inherited from the West African cooking of Bahia, and malagueta chilli. Acaraje shows that lineage plainly: a peeled black-eyed pea batter fried in dende, split open and filled. Vegan feijoada keeps the structure of the national dish, black beans simmered at length, without the cured meats.

Lunch is the main meal, served as one plate combining rice, beans, a stewed vegetable and a raw salad. Roots and squashes hold a place the north-east defined: quibebe cooks squash down to a puree with onion and coriander. Coconut milk works as both fat and cooking liquid, as in vegetable moqueca, cooked in a clay pot with tomato, pepper and coriander. Cheese and cassava meet in vegan pao de queijo, built on tapioca starch.