Orphaned at the age of seven, Jorgina Pereira was placed in the care of her godmother in Rio de Janeiro, who worried that her temperamental young charge might try to poison her with arsenic. That was a popular method of dispatching characters on the radionovelas she listened to all day long in the kitchen. So although Pereira was permitted to watch as her guardian prepared food like the national dish, feijoada (black beans simmered for hours with up to seven different beef and pork parts), she was never allowed to cook.
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Pereira didn’t want to stay in the kitchen anyway. At 13 she won a placement at a distant high school, but her godmother, who hoped to marry her off instead, balked at paying the bus fare. A social worker arranged another scholarship for the teen at a Catholic boarding school, but Pereira first had to prove her commitment by sitting out Carnaval in a convent. “In Rio that’s unthinkable,” she says. “Nobody believed that I was going to do it.”
A disciple of Martha Stewart’s, she cooked regularly for friends, and word of her parties got around. In 1990 she got a call from a caterer who’d won a bid to cook for a huge event involving five different cuisines, one of which had to be Brazilian. Could she do feijoada for 600? The caterer was oddly secretive about the client’s identity, and there was a catch: the feijoada had to be vegetarian–no chorizo, beef tongue, or pig’s feet. “I was like, ‘These Americans,’” Pereira says. “But I never say no.” She went into the kitchen and adapted the recipe as best she could. Later, the caterer reported that there had been none left at the end of the night.
