People arrive at the ground hungry here. That is the first thing to understand about football in the north. The food is half the day.
Start with açaí, and I mean the real thing, the way it comes in Pará. It is thick enough to hold a spoon upright, unsweetened, almost bitter, dark purple, served cold in a bowl with farinha and often with fried fish on the side. The sweetened version you know from abroad is a smoothie that left home and lost its way. On matchday the açaí sellers do their best trade in the hour before kickoff, and you see people eating it standing up with a plastic spoon while arguing about the starting eleven.
the ground and the street
Around Baenão the vendors set up early and in their own order. The tacacá comes first, because it takes time and because it is the thing you eat before you eat anything else. Tacacá is a hot yellow broth of tucupi and jambu, with tapioca and dried shrimp floating in it, served in a cuia, a gourd bowl, and drunk hot while you stand. The jambu numbs your lips for about five minutes. Every visitor asks about this. Every visitor is told it is the best part.
Then the caldinho sellers, which is the true matchday food of the terraces. Caldinho is a thick, rich broth of beans, served in a cup with whatever you want on top: sausage, cheese, cassava, farofa, a hard-boiled egg if you are lucky. It is the food of cold nights and long halves. You hold it in one hand and gesticulate with the other, which is the correct way to watch football anywhere on earth.
the heavy dishes
For the people who came to eat properly, there is maniçoba. This is the dish of the region and of the Círio season, and it is the one I recommend to anyone with a whole afternoon to spare. Maniçoba is made from the leaves of the manioc plant, ground and cooked for three days, slowly, with pork parts that reward the patient: sausage, ear, feet, bacon. It comes out black and glossy and it tastes like the forest looks. You eat it with white rice and farinha and you do not eat anything else for hours.
Maniçoba around a Re-Pa is a whole social event. Families make it at home the day before, and you can smell the pots going in the neighbourhoods around the ground from the morning of the game.
There is also the simpler stuff, the stuff you eat walking. Fried fish from the river, tapioca off the griddle with whatever is in season, the churrasco skewers, the corn. The vendors around the ground know the regulars by their order. Mine is the same as my father’s, which is the same as his father’s, and I have never once been asked what I want.
the smell is the point
If you have never been to a ground in this city, the detail I would give you is the smell. Bean broth and wood smoke and tucupi and the sweet-sour of açaí, all of it mixed with the river air and the sweat of a full terrace. It is what tells you the game is close before you see the floodlights.
Football food abroad is industrial and uniform: pies, hot dogs, beer in branded cups, the same at every ground in the country. Ours comes out of gourds and clay pots and the hands of people who have been cooking in the same spot since before the stadium’s current name. That is worth something on its own, quite apart from the football.
After the final whistle the caldinho sellers make their second trade, for the crowd walking home, and the argument about the game runs on bean broth until the stands empty.
