In 20th-century Brazil, the day isn't divided into starter-main-dessert but is paced by coffee: a light café da manhã (bread, fruit, coffee with milk), then the midday prato feito — a single complete plate where white rice and black beans form the invariable base, accompanied by meat and a vegetable. Between meals, the cafezinho, a very strong, sweet little coffee, tirelessly punctuates life in offices and labs. Festive meals happen on Saturdays around a shared feijoada. For Hertha Meyer, an émigré from Germany, this tropical rhythm was superimposed on the memory of the cakes of her European childhood.

Two pillars of the Brazilian table that this German biophysicist adopted in Rio: black beans, the nourishing base of every lunch, and strong coffee that marked her long days of microscopy at the Instituto de Biofísica.