Canjica, in its sertão sense of mungunzá

As tradition built it

Canjica / mungunzá

Serves 6. About 1 hour 40 minutes' cooking, after soaking 12 hours.

Ingredients

To soak

• 250g dried white canjica corn
• 1 litre water

To cook

• 1.5 litres water
• 3g (½ tsp) salt

To finish

• 480ml whole milk
• 200ml coconut milk
• 180g white sugar
• 5cm cinnamon stick
• 5 cloves
• to serve ground cinnamon

Method

1. Cover the corn with the litre of water and leave it 12 hours, out of the fridge.
2. Drain it and put it in a pressure cooker with the 1.5 litres of water and the salt. Cook under pressure 30 minutes, until the grains are soft.
3. Let the pressure down and open it. Keep the corn in its cooking water; the starch makes the canjica creamy.
4. Stir in the milk, coconut milk and sugar until it dissolves. Take out half a cup of corn and liquid, blend it smooth, and return it. Add the cinnamon and cloves.
5. Cook uncovered over a low heat about an hour, stirring now and then, until it is creamy and coats the back of a spoon.
6. Serve hot in bowls, dusted with cinnamon. It thickens as it cools; loosen it with a little milk.

Notes

In the Northeast the sweet corn porridge most of Brazil calls canjica is properly mungunzá; canjica more often names a different dish here, a fresh green corn cream closer to what São Paulo calls curau. The porridge is treated under its correct sertão name.

Scholars are divided on whether the word itself has a Kimbundu, Bantu-language, root or a separate African etymology again.

It sits, with pamonha and cuscuz, at the centre of the Northeastern São João table each June.

The recipe is Debora Bonato's, of Cozinha Técnica, who gives all three names. Sandra Guimarães, of Papacapim, cooking her Northeastern home's mungunzá learned from Nalva, uses fresh coconut milk alone, about double the volume of cooked corn, and cooks it only 5 to 10 minutes after the pressure cooker. Bela Gil cooks hers in coconut milk with coconut sugar and grated coconut.

What a modern chef changes

Two textures kept distinct

Method

1. Keep the long soak and simmer as tradition dictates, since they are doing real chemical work, hydrating and softening the hominy's tough pericarp, with no honest shortcut around that.
2. Rather than crushing a portion of the whole corn back in to thicken the pot, which muddies the texture, blend a small measured portion to a completely smooth cream in a high-power blender.
3. Swirl the blended cream through at the end, giving the dish both the whole kernel's bite and a genuinely silky base, the two textures kept distinct rather than folded into one average one.