The meals and other domestic arrangements on these plantations are of a piece with the dwelling. The dinner is served to the stranger and the male members of the family only, and consists of broth and a portion of the contents of the above-mentioned panniers, with perhaps the addition of a little fresh beef; but this, having been several hours on the fire to make the broth, is not easily separated from the other. This dish fills a plate to the very outside, and is well piled up, and another plate equally well filled with pirao, made of manioc flour, mixed with some of the broth, and formed into an unctuous sort of pudding. Besides these two dishes, which constitute the most important part of the meal, there will be a plate containing some of the contents of the cask baked on the embers, and two small plates, one containing bruised chili peppers, lime juice, and broth, as sauce for the beef, and the other some of the peppers, oil, vinegar, raw small onions, and garlic sliced, as sauce for the cod fish. Dessert will consist of bananas, Dutch cheese, and guava, potato, or other sweets. All help themselves with their own knives and forks, when they have such things, sometimes the guest only being supplied with them, because he is a foreigner. In the latter case the rest help themselves with the apparatus nature gave them. It is done thus: each has a plate near him, and the meat, pirao, and sauces remain in the middle of the table. They draw from the dish a portion of the meat which they lay in their respective plates; this is subdivided by hand. With the ends of the fingers each then scoops out a piece of pirao, about as big as a hen’s egg, a shred of the beef is laid into the hot sauce and withdrawn; and the two having been a little worked up together with the ends of the fingers and the palm of the same hand until they are tolerably incorporated, the elongated bolus is conveyed to the mouth and swallowed in a manner that would probably astonish a Neapolitan macaroni eater, and certainly astounds everybody else who witnesses it for the first time.
The class of Brazilians of whose mode of living the foregoing conveys a slight idea is fast disappearing before the rapid strides that civilization is making in the country. The majority of the planters of the present day are intelligent, and free from most of the prejudices inherited from the old Portuguese settlers. Many of the landed proprietors live in large, well-built houses, keep excellent tables, and, indeed, are generally of high acquirements, some having received a university education, and mixed in the first circles in Europe, and at the court of Rio Janeiro, assimilating in a great measure to the squatters in Australia, or the landowners in New Zealand, many of whom, as is well known, consist of cadets and collateral branches of the noblest and most ancient families of the United Kingdom.
