Back to America's culinary variety

US comfort foods are appealing after nearly a decade of living in Brazil.

from the January 31, 2008 edition

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I also missed Triscuits, bagels, pickled herring, V-8 juice, cocoa with marshmallows in little envelopes, sour cream (yep, that's right – no sour cream in Rio), cranberry juice, grapefruit, sweet corn (the corn in Brazil is the kind we Americans feed to our cattle – tough and fibrous), and New York light deli rye bread with caraway seeds.

Shall I go on? I could – there were at least 20 more items on my list.

Seriously, I have nothing against Brazilian food. I'm always happy enough to eat rice, beans, a piece of chicken, and a "salad." (In Brazil, salads are often made of cold, cooked vegetables with a couple of hard-boiled quail eggs.)

There is one thing I'll really miss, though – the ubiquitous Brazilian juice bars where you can get all kinds of tropical juices, either plain or mixed together in a blender. My favorite was a thick, almost sherbetlike "juice" made of dark little berries from northeastern Brazil, called açaí. It's so substantial that it seems more like a meal than a juice, and most people eat it with a spoon.

When I first got back to New York, it seemed that not much had changed. I could still get my favorite canned refried beans and tostada shells (and those yummy canned chopped green chiles), my favorite brown sugar Pop-Tarts were still on the shelf, and the variety of chocolate goodies was still as mind-boggling as ever.

I was ready to try it all, and some new stuff, too, wherever I could find it.

So after I picked up the obligatory nostalgia-busting supermarket items, I did what any self-respecting New Yorker would do – I looked in Time Out magazine, which has a comprehensive list of restaurants featuring every kind of cuisine imaginable, and I started to make a mental list of which ones I'd visit first.

However, I opted to pass on a new midtown Mexican restaurant that featured grasshopper tacos, even though the reviewer swore they were as tasty as "Cracker Jack peanuts." I'll take my Cracker Jack peanuts straight, thank you very much.

As I headed out for my first New York restaurant meal in a long time (I decided on Thai food to start), I thought about how much I actually would miss Rio. Naturally, I would miss the music and the beach and the people, but also the mouthwatering, deep-orange papayas; the endless variety of vitaminas (fruit smoothies); and even the odd vegetables that are rarely – if ever – seen in the US, such as giló, a small, green, slightly bitter cousin of the eggplant.

But I have to admit I'm glad to be back to the never-ending cornucopia of goodies right here at home. Look out, pad Thai noodles, here I come!

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