Whenever members of my family travel , we like to immerse ourselvesĀ into certain aspects of their culture. Since my daughters will be going to a convention in Rio de Janeiro, we thought it would be fun to look at some of the local fare. Charles Darwin ( I’ll cover that in another post) wrote in his ‘Journal’ about the two types of meals he found in parts of South America: roast meat or boiled meat and sometimes a little pumpkin. šĀ In the south of Brazil, they love barbecue or “Churrasco”. These were my kind of guys!
Today, however, we will be talking about Brazil’s National drink… the ‘Caipirinha’ made with ‘CachaƧa’ or Brazilian sugar cane rum. There are three types of rum you can buy from Brazil: 1) rum made purely for export 2) what they refer to as ‘industrial’ or from large operations and 3) the ‘artisian’. Personally, I like the sound of a smaller batch rum made and distilled in copper kettles, so the ‘artisian’ is what I was searching. I settled on “Cabana”.
Interestingly enough the name ‘Caipirinha’ means ‘from the country’ and some say it closely resembles our concept of ‘hillbilly’.
Here is their basic recipe:
2 oz. — CachaƧa
2 teaspoons — crystal sugar
ice
lime
Process: take a few slices of lime and cover with the sugar and mash together, add ice, then the rum and stir! It is a simple yet nice drink… make one and it might become your favorite as well!
Saude!, Viva!, Topa!
Roger Freberg
