Matar a Saudade
In London, the Brazilian home bakers satisfying our longing. Words by Branca Lessa de Sá.
This article is part of Give Us This Day: A Vittles London Bakery Project. To read the rest of the essays and guides in this project, please click here.
Matar a saudade
In London, the Brazilian home bakers satisfying our longing. Words by Branca Lessa de Sá. Illustration by Isadora Machado.
People often try to pin down the elusive meaning of saudade, a kind of longing or homesickness associated with Lusophone cultures. For me, it has always been simple. Saudade is a sort of hunger, a very specific craving for a taste that cannot be found anywhere but at home. During my first few years in London, after leaving Brazil as a child, I’d often fantasise about the milky sweetness of doce de leite; the earthy crunch of farofa; the sharp tang of queijo coalho. Every time we travelled back to Rio to visit family, my brother and I would play a game on the plane. We’d conjure up a list of the things we most wanted to eat – an inventory of our saudade. We’d organise them in order of priority, as if writing a to-do list: the bisnaguinhas my grandad would pan-fry with butter when we arrived, the bolo de rolo with layers and layers of sticky red jam, the folhados that left crumbs all over our clothes. Weeks later, on the way back, we’d assess our progress. It wasn’t a successful visit if we hadn’t managed to tick them all off.
My strongest saudade was for the unofficial food, the ‘treats’ squeezed in between proper meals. Food you can eat with your hands, that has too much sugar, too much butter, not enough nutrients. Food that you find at birthday parties and at your local bakery. Part of the reason I craved this stuff so much was because it seemed near-impossible to find in London. You can buy seasoned black beans in Tesco, go to Kilburn for feijoada. There are plenty of churrascarias around. But baked goods? Cakes and pastries? Confectionery? You can make these things at home, of course, but the ingredients are often hard to find. Plus, few of us are endowed with the attention to detail required for excellent baking.
It took many years – and a job in which I was surrounded by other Brazilians – for me to unearth the extensive network of Brazilian home bakers in London. They’re hard to find, largely because they are small businesses that function almost entirely by word-of-mouth. Most of them aren’t on Google; they don’t have websites or physical shops. To know them, you need an in: a Brazilian friend, or co-worker, or – as is the case for many – a fellow member of one of London’s Brazilian churches.
Geni Cordeiro is one such home baker. She is known for her cakes, docinhos (fudge-like treats made with sweetened condensed milk) and pães de mel (bite-sized, honey-flavoured cakes). I first ordered from her during the pandemic, for my mum’s birthday. It was that bleak period when birthday celebrations consisted of Zoom calls and badly edited video montages; gestures that, in all their noble effort to forge connection, mostly served as reminders of what was no longer possible. I wanted something different, something that could capture the essence of a proper celebration. I reached out to a Brazilian colleague, having seen her post pictures of a party she’d thrown for her son, table laden with perfect-looking docinhos. She responded with a long list of names and numbers. Among them was Geni – who, my colleague said, made some of the best cakes and pães de mel around.
Ordering from Geni felt like sending a wish list to Santa Claus. She asked me what I wanted: how big, what type of dough, what kind of filling. My request was indulgent – something with both brigadeiro and doce de leite – but Geni agreed to turn it into a reality. She advised me that simple white dough, as opposed to other flavoured varieties, would work best for the kind of fillings I wanted. The result was better than I could have imagined. Gooey doce de leite held together layers of dough so soft they came apart like candyfloss. In Portuguese, we speak of matar a saudade, or ‘to kill the homesickness’. These are the things we do to assuage that desperate longing, that restless yearning for a person or place. Homemade arroz and feijão, sessions spent listening to MPB, visits from friends and loved ones: all are reliable saudade-murderers among my family. That day, Geni’s cake became another one.
Geni has been baking goods at home to sell for the last six years – almost as long as she’s been in London. Before moving here, she lived in Spain for twelve years, where she mainly worked in hotels. Back then, she didn’t have any ambition to be a confectioner, but friends were impressed with the cakes she baked for birthdays and special occasions (she often made things that were common in Brazil but couldn’t be found in Europe). Geni laughs at a brigadeiro cake she made for her son’s birthday, one of her earliest attempts at doing something ‘a bit more special’. She wanted to decorate it but knew nothing about how to do so, so she simply ‘smothered it in M&Ms’. Regardless, when she took a slice to the hotel for her co-workers, they loved it and asked for more.
In 2016, Geni moved to the UK for her son’s studies. At first she worked as a cleaner, but soon enough she was making cakes to sell on the side. They were for friends initially – people she’d met at her church, the Capelania Brasileira in Willesden Green. But it wasn’t long before she began to get orders from others – people who had tasted her cakes at parties and asked for her number.
Geni’s pães de mel, however, were where she found her real success. Somewhat resembling the Argentinian alfajor, pães de mel consist of two small slices of spiced honey cake which are glued together by a layer of doce de leite, and are harder to find here than better-known Brazilian treats like brigadeiro or pudim. Geni began making hers based on a recipe from a friend in Brazil, but tweaked it until arriving at what she proudly calls her recipe – one that is now beloved by many Brazilians in London. Lots wanted her variations on the traditional pão de mel: flavours like pistachio, nutella, lime, and passionfruit. While the vast majority of her clients were Brazilian, she started to get a few orders from people outside of the community. To suit a paladar gringo (‘foreign palate’) – one that often finds Brazilian sweets too rich – Geni sometimes uses peanut butter, jam, or other spread instead of the sweeter doce de leite.
2020 was Geni’s busiest period; it was at this point that she realised she had to take her business more seriously. She got a business licence, made a separate Instagram account, repriced her goods. She even considered devoting herself entirely to confectionery, but decided against this due to the stability offered by her contracted nannying job. Geni still does everything herself, from taking orders to making, decorating, and delivering her cakes (although João, her son sometimes helps with delivery). Quantities vary widely, but she tells me she makes an average of four or five large cakes a week, on top of batches of docinhos and pães de mel. As her weekdays are taken up with nannying, baking is squeezed into evenings and weekends. Often, she’ll go deep into the night making her cakes.
João tells me his mother is a perfectionist, stopping and starting all over again if she makes a mistake. ‘Yeah, I’m no fun to be around when I’m baking,’ she laughs. ‘I can get obsessive, but it’s because I know how good the best version of a cake can be.’ It’s an effort that pays off: Geni’s cakes feel at once professional and homemade, products of a labour of love undertaken with laser-like ‘obsessive’ precision. They were an instant hit with my family. Since my mother’s birthday in the pandemic, all others have been met with one request and one request only: a cake by Geni.
There’s a peculiarly Brazilian trait among London’s amateur bakers: the urge to reinvent old recipes. Unlike Italians, who are famous for their veneration of tradition (mythical as it may be), Brazilians have a penchant for customising, mixing, and bastardising in the kitchen: cream cheese in sushi, goiabada on pizza, pães de queijo filled with runny requeijão. In the cake and pastry industry, it is these variations – these unique combinations of flavours – that can make a business stand out. In London, there’s a lady who makes pães de queijo filled with sausage and black olive, one who sells churros-flavoured brigadeiros, another who makes passionfruit cocadas: the more creative, the better.
There’s something of the ‘new world’ in this impulse to change and modernise – what writer Alex Hochuli has described as a Brazilian ‘disregard’ for the past, a myopic focus on the present. And there’s something of the immigrant experience in it, too: the inventions, reinventions and adaptations in order to survive.
It’s not a surprise that many of these businesses thrived during the Covid pandemic. The humble size of our aptly nicknamed docinhos and salgadinhos (little sweet and little savoury treats, respectively) made it possible to send them in the post. And the fact that these businesses were being run from home, by one person alone, made them more resilient to the disruptions of pandemic restrictions.
Ask around, however, and people will mention another factor impacting the popularity of Brazilian home bakers in London: Naira. Naira is Geni’s mentor, but she is also an inspiration for Brazilian confectioners trying to start a business abroad, a home-baking success story. Naira moved to London almost twenty years ago and, like Geni, first worked as a cleaner before getting into confectionery. Although she had no experience in professional baking, Naira loved making cakes and had grown up doing so for her four younger siblings. When she took some of her homemade creations to events at church, they were an instant hit. Soon enough, she was baking full-time. Her interest was increasingly in highly stylised, meticulously decorated cakes, the kind served at weddings and other special occasions. It’s a difficult art to master, but Naira devoted herself entirely. She spent hours watching YouTube videos and did courses to hone her skills. The effort paid off, and her creations became so popular that they went on to be sold in Harrods and featured in well-known confectionery magazines. She even participated in a series of Bake Off: The Professionals.
As her success grew, Naira began to get messages from those who wished to pursue a similar path to hers, seeking guidance and advice. Eventually she decided to hire a studio, where she could run workshops for aspiring home bakers on a range of confectionery skills. The classes were booked up quickly, but Naira soon realised that they didn't offer what many people needed most: the skills and knowledge required to run a business. So, she set up a mentorship scheme. ‘With my mentees, I follow them every step of the way’, she tells me. ‘It’s something I wish I had when I started. Because when you do something like this, you’re often completely alone … and very lost.’
Indeed, the highly personal nature of semi-professional bakeries – as well as the fact they’re run primarily by women – can make them particularly subject to abuse. Geni tells me that while her customers are no longer just her acquaintances, they often treat her as such. People will demand she lower the prices, complain about paying for delivery. ‘Sometimes I have to travel up to an hour to take a cake somewhere, being careful to keep it intact,’ she says. ‘I can’t afford to not charge for that.’
The boundaries between formal and informal work are often quite blurred in Brazil, a country where class divisions are stark and rarely overcome. Women from poorer backgrounds frequently work as ‘maids’ in the homes of middle-class families, doing everything from the daily laundry to feeding the kids and taking them to school. They’ll be called ‘tia’ (auntie) by children who have grown up with their food (rather than their parents’), while being paid minimum wage for strenuous physical and emotional work, work that often keeps them away from their own families.
These class divisions are often re-enacted by the Brazilian immigrant population in London. Often, working-class migrants will be paid smaller-than-average fees for cleaning and nannying jobs in the homes of wealthy families. If at-home confectionery businesses aren’t conducted with formality and rigour, they risk feeding into the same dynamic, with poorer immigrants baking to provide cheap food for the often-lavish events of a wealthier class.
Naira’s main goal, then, is to guide her mentees to a more professional mode of working. One of the first things she teaches her students is how to adequately price their goods. ‘Almost always, they are charging too little for what they make,’ she tells me. Geni says that she was charging £2.50 for her large paes de mel when she first started. When Naira suggested that she more than double the price, she broke down. ‘I was so scared of asking people to pay more’, she says. Naira also advises her students on the steps needed to acquire a business licence, such as appropriate insurance, and ensuring they have separate stocks for their baking ingredients at home.
I ask Naira why she believes so many immigrant women choose to pursue the path of baking. It is, she explains, a way for them to grow in a new country, despite the language and cultural barriers. You don’t need to do a job interview or a language test to start doing it. It’s also, she says, a ‘way to express that which is your culture, which is your country.’
It's this wish that seems to be behind the popularity of these businesses. Goods like Geni’s – which provide food for birthdays, Festas Juninas, Christmases, and baptisms – enable Brazilians in London to keep rituals from home alive here. More than anything, people come to these home bakers with a very specific wish: to kill the saudade. It’s a big ask, and one that can’t always be met. Geni tells me that customers will show her pictures of cakes made in Brazil and ask that she recreate them exactly; she explains that this isn’t always possible. But more often than not, she does manage to realise people’s fantasies and, at least momentarily, to fill in the ravenous contours of their longing. Until the next order, at least.
You can find Geni on Instagram here: cordeirogeni
Credits
Branca Lessa de Sá is a writer and journalist working in London. She was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Find her on X @branca_lessa.
Isadora Machado is an artist currently working and living in Porto, Portugal. Having paved a path with wanderings and experiments, their work explores the mysteries around drawing and poetic processes. Find more of their work at isadoram.com.
This piece was edited by Adam Coghlan and Jonathan Nunn, and sub-edited by Sophie Whitehead.
Food not many know but all SHOULD.
Amazing! Thank you for sharing! Highlighting the artistry coming out of Brazil. I’m reading this whilst on a street called Rua da Saudade. Obrigada!