PDQ BY RAFAELA SABÓ
Rafaela Sabó, a São Paulo-based food and beverage professional, explores how food can orient us across cities and phases of life. For Sabó, her beloved childhood (and quintessential Brazilian) snack, pão de queijo, does just that.
On Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, devout Catholics fast on bread and water to show penitence for their sins as they prepare for Easter. Growing up, the only person I thought I knew who did this was my grandma. Though I lived in Orlando at the time, sometimes spring break would coincide with one of these holy dates, and I would get to fly back to Brazil and watch her fast and think to myself how lucky she is that the Catholic Church is making her only eat bread for a whole day. When I was old enough to try my luck on what felt like one of the best days of the year, I told her I wanted to join in on the fun, but with one little technicality… instead of pão, how about pão de queijo?
My love for pão de queijo, which I lovingly refer to as pdq (‘pee-dee-queue’), started young. It’s a tale as old as time, but when my family moved abroad when I was three, food was the only thing we could replicate to keep our feeling of home alive. We had our everyday staples like rice and beans, but some snack foods felt wholly Brazilian when I ate them. They felt so distant from what others around me knew that they became the tether between my ongoing cultural assimilation and the purity of my Brazilianity.
Amongst those foods, but more so than others because of its mark as a household staple across Brazil, was always pdq. Cozy in its structure, pdq carries the elasticity of yucca with a tang of Brazilian funk that comes through slightly cheesy without feeling anything like a mozzarella stick. It’s a cohesive dough, not a filled bread, so every bite carries both the dryness of the crumb and the tackiness of the core. It’s taken me years to even put the flavor profile of my favorite food into words. Having pão de queijo has rarely been about that; it’s always been about having a piece of home.
In my childhood in Orlando, I would cut my pães (plural pão) into the tiniest of pieces and nibble on them in an effort to make them last longer. Since I had a limited amount while we were abroad, I did everything to make the smell and taste linger. I did this every time I ate pdq until summer break of each year, when I would be greeted with a bag full and a couple of extras that my grandparents would buy for me at the airport. It was their way of extending home to me, confirming that I was cared for here. When I moved back to Brazil as a young teenager, I saw myself begin to take control of my life, seeking my own comforts and pleasures. In times of happiness or stress, I became caught up in the abundance of pdq; on my most exaggerated day, I ate 50 cocktail-sized pdqs and then did it again the next day! BUt between the lines the narrative stayed true. I was seeking the comfort others had bestowed upon me throughout my life. Years later, living in New York, I continued to try to replicate this comfort myself. Whenever I needed to let up my longing for home, needed a guaranteed smile and a pause amid the noise, they were what I sought. I would go to O Cafe on 6th Ave, order two to-go, and walk the fine line between the dream city-life I was living and the pieces of me that stayed back home.
Today, living back in São Paulo again, I miss the pieces of me back in New York, and bits of me that were fragile before are now full. I love pão de queijo just the same, but my need for them has evolved. Here at home, they’re an extension of love, one of many loops in a long chain that tie us all together. They’re our consensus and our ongoing friendly debate. Each of us can be specific about how we like them, where we like them from, which ones we make at home, and do we air-fry? Or bake? For how many minutes? And at what temperature? And even with each little detail, the answer is always the same: they are home.
RAFAELA’S FAVORITE PDQ SPOTS:
Favorite Chain PDQ: Dengo
Favorite Supermarket PDQ: St. Marche
Favorite PDQ CAFE: Pão de Queijo Haddock Lobo
Favorite PDQ SPOT IN NYC: O CAFE
For more recs like this one, check out the rest of vol. 001:
