Tutu de Feijão

Tutu belongs to the colonial kitchens of inland Minas Gerais, where the 18th-century gold rush drew a large population but left wheat scarce and expensive to haul over the mountains. Cooks leaned on what the land gave — beans, corn, and abundant cassava flour — and used the flour to stretch and thicken a pot of beans into a filling meal without costly imports. The word 'tutu' comes from Kimbundu, a Bantu language of Angola brought by enslaved Africans; in Brazilian Portuguese it long carried the sense of a bogey or scary apparition (papão) used to frighten children, and how it attached to the bean dish is not settled. What is clear is that the technique — thickening beans with cassava flour — is Afro-Brazilian, and the dish became so identified with the region that it is also simply called tutu à mineira.

A bowl of pale-brown bean paste, thick enough to hold the shape of the spoon. The texture is its signature — smooth and dense from the cassava flour cooked in, somewhere between a refried-bean spread and a soft polenta, with the odd whole bean left for bite. The flavour is deeply savoury: bacon and garlic up front, the earthy beans underneath, salt pulling it together. Spooned over rice, crowned with the egg and the bright bitterness of the garlicky couve, it eats rich and grounding rather than light.

The body comes from cassava flour (farinha de mandioca) hydrating and swelling in the hot bean liquid. Unlike farofa — flour toasted dry in fat and kept loose — here the flour is rained into the simmering beans and stirred constantly, where its starch absorbs the liquid and gelatinises into a cohesive paste. Add it too fast or stop stirring and it clumps into lumps; add it gradually off a gentle simmer and it thickens evenly to a creamy set. Part-mashing some of the beans first releases their own starch and helps the purée bind. Bacon or pork fat renders in at the start, both seasoning the base and carrying flavour through the starch.