tropeiro

The Portuguese word 'tropa' meant a drove of animals or a body of men moving together, borrowed from Old French 'trope' and ultimately from a Frankish root related to herding. In Portugal 'tropa' referred to military companies and livestock herds interchangeably. When Brazil's interior began to open in the seventeenth century, the word attached itself to a specific profession: the tropeiro, the muleteer who led pack trains of mules and oxen through mountains and plains with no roads.

Tropeiros were the arteries of colonial Brazil. From the 1600s through the 1800s they moved gold from Minas Gerais, cotton from Maranhão, cattle from the sertão, and dried goods from the coast. A single tropa could comprise fifty to two hundred mules, and the tropeiro was responsible for every one of them. The profession required sourcing food from whatever the land offered and maintaining enough authority to keep hired hands from deserting in the backcountry.

The dish now called feijão tropeiro was born on these journeys. Tropeiros could not carry perishable food, so their larder consisted of dried beans, manioc flour, salt pork, and linguiça sausage. At the end of the day's march they fried the beans with whatever fat and protein they had, stirred in farinha to absorb the liquid, and called it done. The name 'tropeiro' attached to the dish by the nineteenth century, when the occupation was fading but the recipe had become regional identity.

The tropeiro era ended with railways and roads in the early twentieth century. The profession disappeared, but the word held in the cuisine. Today feijão tropeiro is the official dish of Minas Gerais, and restaurants in São Paulo and Rio serve it as a marker of mineiro identity. The agent suffix '-eiro,' which makes a padeiro a baker and a fazendeiro a rancher, attached to 'tropa' and produced a word that outlasted the profession it named.