Sobá

Sobá arrived in Mato Grosso do Sul with Okinawan immigrants, who began settling in the Campo Grande area from the early 20th century — many first drawn to the region by railway construction and later building one of Brazil's largest Okinawan communities. Their home dish, Okinawa soba (a wheat noodle in pork broth, distinct from mainland Japanese buckwheat soba), was carried into the Feira Central, where it was adapted to local ingredients and tastes and sold to a wider Brazilian public. Over the decades it crossed over from an immigrant-community food to a citywide icon eaten by everyone. In 2006 sobá and the Feira Central were recognised as intangible cultural heritage of Mato Grosso do Sul, cementing its status as the dish of Campo Grande.

A wide bowl of broth that tastes of long-simmered pork and egg, salty and clean, with that faint sweetness immigrant cooks brought from Okinawa. The wheat noodles are soft and slippery, springier than buckwheat. On top: slivers of cooked pork, golden ribbons of fried egg, and a heap of fresh scallion that goes in raw so it stays sharp. You stir it together so the egg and pork sink into the soup, then eat it hot, often with a side of soy sauce or chili to adjust as you go. At the Feira Central it comes fast and steaming, the bowl too hot to hold by the rim.

The broth is the dish: pork bones and meat simmered long with egg and aromatics until it turns rich and full-bodied, the collagen from the bones giving it body. Okinawan cooks traditionally build a clean, slightly sweet pork stock rather than a dark or heavily spiced one, and that restraint is what gives Campo Grande sobá its particular savour. Wheat noodles — not buckwheat — are used because Okinawa soba is itself a wheat noodle; their gluten gives the springy chew that holds up in hot soup. The fried-egg topping is cooked thin as an omelette and cut into strips, adding richness and colour, while the scallion is added raw at the end so its volatile sulphur compounds stay pungent and lift the heavy broth.