Coxinha

Coxinha: fried chicken croquette; popular street food in Brazil.

To welcome me to Brazil and to the Agency the students of Ae! surprised me with a plate of coxinha + cupcakes. A classic combination. Apparently Nigella Lawson loves coxinha, hence they assumed as a fellow British woman so too would I. Excellent deductive reasoning — they’re delicious.

Ae! is made up of marketing students at the local Catholic University, a few blocks away from the NGO. Under the guidance of their Professor, Fontanella, they were enlisted to help with the project. And three days in I’ve been impressed by their dedication. Alongside classes and assignments they’ve dived straight in. Day-by-day we’ve been gaining new recruits and now have 10 keen students hard at work for Espaço da Criança.

As part of the brief development I assigned different areas for the students to dig-into to learn more about: the NGO; others in the area; who they serve; those we want to talk to and the broader cultural moment that framed the local hype around the fire in the favelas. Although the students go to University around the corner from the NGO, none of them had heard of it before; they live in a different Recife to that of the families who rely on Espaço da Criança.

Victor and Natalia were tasked with learning more about the NGO itself and were invited to join a key skills cookery class that’s offered to the mothers of the children and the women of the favelas. It just so happened that they were making coxinha.

The classes focus on food that’s easy to make en masse and that can be sold via offices, or on the street. I watched-on as the cook showed how to make the coxinha pastry; expertly rolling it in her hands. And soon too were Victor, Natalia and the women. It became evident to them that Espaço da Criança didn’t just serve the children, it helped the women too. As one said: this gives me something I can make for myself; an honorable way to make money, that I can be proud of.

 

Nigella’s recipe for coxinha can be found here.