Sao Paulo has been described to me as “huge, ugly, and terrifying”. The view, as the flight from London approached Guarulhos airport one February morning, seemed to rhyme with that tryptic of doom.

I woke up above a pastoral idyll. An endless expanse of hills was running outside our windows, bathed in the golden light of dawn. The last dregs of that night’s rainfall hung around the deepest valleys, and everything looked fresh, lush, at peace. I could almost taste the sweet coffee those hills produced.

Then, it all changed. Gone were the thickets of trees, the verdant pastures, the hamlets, and the dirt roads dug into the red soil. The hills remained; only, they were covered in buildings. Shacks and condominiums, workshops and factories, supermarkets and junkyards: they covered every space, rising and falling in synchronicity with the topography of the land. Puffy clouds mingled with a thin layer of smog as we lost altitude above the endless sprawl of Sao Paulo. Skyscrapers broke through the flotsam of bricks, and highways clogged with vehicles bisected neighbourhoods as if they were man-made rivers.

Slowly, a different Sao Paulo emerged. There was dilapidation and dereliction, poverty and pollution, but from ground level there was plenty of beauty to be found. Marvellous tropical trees lined the streets, providing shade from the sun and much-needed shelter from the eyesores towering above us. Wild orchids sprouted from moist trunks, rising above cobwebs of power lines.

The most unexpected surprise, though, came from the Paulistanos themselves. Sao Paulo is, as I discovered, one of the most diverse megalopolises in the world. A mere 150 years ago, almost no one called these hills home; now, twelve million live within the city limits alone. They came from the entire globe, lured by cattle and coffee, industry and finance. Here they settled, with Korean evangelicals rubbing shoulders into tzitzit-wearing Jews, and they gave birth to a human landscape of breath-taking diversity.

It was tempting to picture Sao Paulo – and, by extension, the whole of Brazil – as an enlightened society where skin complexion, eye shape or sexual orientation were no longer controversial. The beauty of the climate, the abundance of gorgeous fruit, the fact that bars stocked Cynar amaro made a compelling case for a society as happy as the inflection of its language, so musical and free from the coarseness of its Lusitanian forefather.

It was, alas, an illusion.

Brazil enslaved more people, and for longer, than any other colony in the northern bit of this hemisphere; and the exceedingly large gulf between haves- and have-nots still ran along racial lines. I couldn’t escape the reality of how most of those who drank coffee-and-tonic in Pinheiro looked like me (only sexier, and less sweaty) while those who worked in the kitchens, or slept in the gutters, didn’t. Prodigiously few black Brazilians strolled in the streets of the posh neighbourhoods where I ambled, and none sat at the tables of a restaurant where I’d gone to try a dish that, according to legend, their ancestors had invented.

Feijoada.

I’d always held the belief that wealthy people make for bad musicians, lousy sportspeople and bad cooks; the – alleged, at least – origins of the incredible dish I was about to enjoy seemed to confirm the stereotype. In the words of Peter Robb, whose A Death in Brazil was to be my guide in this culinary exploration, a feijoada was a “slave dish”, made from “bits and pieces graciously conceded, or filched or rescued from the trash”.

At its heart, a feijoada is a stew of beans and meat. A concoction cooked slowly for hours, with a broth the consistence (and temperature) of Icelandic lava, a dish more suited to misty November evenings in Lyon than tropical Saturdays in Brazil. As I headed over to the restaurant, I found myself hoping that, for once, Brazilians had overcome their instinctive mistrust of air conditioning and had lowered the temperature to Arctic standards.

Tordesilhas’ wide windows were flung open, shutters rolled up to reveal the handsomely furnished interiors. With a sigh I stepped in, taking place at a table by one of the windows. The restaurant was a one-storey building sandwiched between ghastly condos, parodies of Chambord twenty stories high and surrounded by electric fences. A thick layer of tropical bushes and a few trees erected a green wall around us, shielding the patrons from the noise of the road and – crucially – the sight of such architectural abomination.  The dining hall was on the small side, hosting no more than forty seats; it was homely, a mixture of wood and pastel colours and mementos from an old house in the countryside. Such were the origins of the chef, Maria Salles.

A rattan lampshade swayed lazily in the breeze, but no wind reached down to my corner. An appetizer of shrimp in manioc cream and coconut cream landed on the crisp white tablecloth in front of me and, as I started tackling it, I began sweating like Gerard Depardieu at his fourth bottle of Bordeaux.

Caipirinhas glided in as the saviours they were. The drinks – with Espiritu do Minhas as the cachaça – arrived with a very welcome corollary of crushed limes and ice, a napkin studiously folded to mop up the inevitable moisture. And not a minute too late: because, with the pomp and circumstance that belied the importance of the occasion, a small procession of waiters is en route, carrying the legion of pots and bowls that make a feijoada.

The mise-en-place choreography done, I took a breather to take stock of the situation. On the table was the most interesting of colours, textures and – as I would find out – flavours I’d seen in a long while. Lightly-sauteed kale shone in a feast of dark greens next to the pristine-white of plain, boiled white rice. A small receptacle held a tomato-based pimento sauce, as fiery as it looked. Next was the toasted manioca flour known as farofa. Further still, two peeled orange wedges stood rather incongruously next the main ticket: the great earthenware pot that held in its belly the stew. The precious potion of black beans and meats sat centrepiece, promising a feast of pork and beef: in it, Robb wrote, one could find almost endless variations of a barrel of odds and ends, like Huck Finn once said. Pig ears, cow trotters, sausage, ribs, bacon. Salted, smoked, braised, air-cured, jerky.

If there is a dignified way to eat a feijoada, I’m yet to find it. Patrons came and went: matrons in tailleurs, young women in flowery dresses with audacious necklines, men-about-town in Polo shirts and linen trousers had all the charm and charisma in the world, but not yours truly. The delicate boundaries I’d established in the plate soon disappeared as kale mingled with rice, and as the farofa absorbed the stew’s juices. The breeze picked up and, at last, a torrential downpour unleashed outside, drowning dozens of conversations in its clangour.

I carried on in my journey of culinary discovery. The earthenware pot had seemingly come from wherever Mary Poppins sourced her handbags, for it yielded an endless stream of new cuts of meat, of flavours and textures. A stew was nothing new to this child of the Alps, and beans weren’t unknown either; but the alternance between salty and sweet, between melt-in-your-mouth braised rump and air-dried jerky certainly was. I wondered at the idea of kale and fresh orange accompanying a stew, tried it and loved it.

By far, though, the biggest revelation was farofa. There it was, unassuming and modest, in its bowl, looking nothing more than coarse sand. It had the colour of parchment paper and promised all the excitement of a legal treatise. And, yet, all it took was a spoonful why this unpretending vegetable had become the true unifier of this country, eaten in shacks and suites alike. The truth is that it was unquestionably good.

I’d read that the manioc from which this nutty delicacy originated is, in its original state, highly toxic. But, through an elaborate process of rinsing, grating, grinding and roasting it became not only edible, but irresistible. This technique was one of the gifts made by the Tupi indíos to the Portuguese in one of Brazil’s most momentous exchange, and it continues to be used today, five centuries after.

I looked back at my plate, at the tablecloth now turned into a Jackson Pollock, and then further on at the entire restaurant, now fully occupied with happy patrons. Somewhere, in the delicate mosaic of flavours I’d just enjoyed, in this restaurant, in this entire city, lay hidden a metaphor about us, about life. But rather than searching for it I raised a hand to call the attention of a passing-by waiter. They must’ve had an amaro in the liqueur cabinet.