The word rice comes from the Arabic of the region of Andalusia, Spain, arráwz and this in turn comes from the ancient Greek, rice. It’s interesting to see how the origins of words give us clues as to where they come from and what their deeper meanings are. Old dictionaries can give us even more interesting clues. For a food historian to follow these tracks is to understand where that food went and how it was used by different populations.
Scientists and researchers are unanimous in saying that rice is originally from Asia and would have arrived in Europe via Persia, Turkey and the Middle East. The Iberian Peninsula began to cultivate rice between the 7th and 8th centuries and, with the expansion to America, grains and ways of cultivation came.
The Dicionário Raphael Bluteau, published in Portugal at the beginning of the 18th century, gives the following definition for rice: “a kind of grain that is white only when milled. Its cane is thicker and more knotty than wheat. Its leaves mimic those of the cane. It does not produce an ear, but a certain plume, like corn. The sheath in which the grain is located is yellow and oval in shape. It only occurs in humid and irrigated lands. Cooked in water, it is commonly eaten by the Indians, but it is not very nutritious. The ordinary drink of the Chinese is rice wine, whose color takes that of the wire and is as tasty as the best wine in Europe.”
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As soon as they disembarked, the Portuguese found indigenous people with rice plantations, different species from those they were used to. Rice and the “water corn of the Tupi people, who planted them on the coast, always in soggy places. In his writings, Pedro Álvares Cabral talks about rice, as does Américo Vespúcio, and as early as 1587, rice crops occupied land in Bahia. Rice crops grew over time and for a century, between the mid-18th century and the second half of the 19th century, Brazil was a major exporter of the product.
Among the wheat-eating and dependent European societies, the taste for rice grew discreetly, and took root in Brazil. Rice appears in our first cookbooks, both in Cozinheiro Imperial and in Cozinheiro Nacional, and also in sweet recipes that become classics, such as rice pudding. D. Pedro II was a great connoisseur of chicken soup, known as rice soup with chicken.
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With the intensification of German and Italian immigration and colonization in the south of the country in the mid-nineteenth century, rice cultivation spread throughout the region. Germans and Italians invested in small farms, with manual harvesting.
In the same period, in Italy, the rice harvest essentially involved very young girls, in very hard work. To help with the crops, they sang work songs, among the best known is Bella Ciao, which was born at the end of the 19th century and became a partisan anthem during the rise of fascism.
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The taste for rice expanded with the consolidation of the Brazilian diet, daily rice and beans. The growing mechanization of crops has transformed rice planting into a big business and Rio Grande do Sul has established itself as the region that grows the most rice in the country. The vast majority of rice planted in the region uses inputs with chemical additives in its production. But the production of organic rice by settled workers from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) has changed this scenario and is growing every year. And it is these same men and women who rescue the history of struggle of the Italian peasant women who sang Bella Ciao and celebrate this year one of the largest organic harvests in the country.
*Joana Monteleone is an editor and historian. Author of the books “Every food has a story” (Oficina Raquel, 2017) and “Urban flavors: food, sociability and consumption” (Alameda Casa Editorial, 2015).
** This is an opinion piece and the author’s views do not necessarily express the journal’s editorial line.
Editing: Vivian Virissimo
