It’s a culinary chameleon, chicken and rice. Like flatbreads, it’s the sort of universal dish seemingly baked into human DNA. How else to explain that regardless of a people’s culture, climate or cooking style, some sort of chicken and rice always seems to assert itself in their cuisine? And almost always expressed as a form of comfort food.

In China, there is claypot chicken rice. In Singapore, there is Hainanese chicken rice. India and Pakistan have endless iterations of biryani. Latin America offers countless variations on arroz con pollo. From the Levant, there is maqluba, in which chicken and rice are turned upside down, quite literally. In Senegal, chicken yassa is always paired with rice; the same can be said of South Africa’s Cape Malay curry. Spain has paella.

And in Brazil, there is galinhada, a one-pot affair that marries the signature ingredients with the country’s love of spice. And it’s that dish that brought me to São Paulo. Mara Salles, considered the grande dame of Brazilian cooking, invited me to dinner at Tordesilhas, her 30-something-year-­old restaurant dedicated to promoting the indigenous cooking of Brazil.

“The character of Brazilian food is connected to nature,” she explained. Though a dish may be enjoyed across the country, you will know where it originated by how it is spiced. Galinhada, for example, comes from north of São Paulo, where turmeric—thanks partly to African influences—is used heavily in cooking.

The dish itself is simple comfort. For my cooking lesson, I turned to Paola Stephan, a home cook who once worked in finance, but quit to pursue her dream of teaching cooking. “It’s a typical dish. All families make galinhada,” she said. “In my home, every Sunday my grandmother prepared galinhada for the entire family.”

To make it, she briefly cooked onion and garlic in ample olive oil before adding a heap of ground turmeric, blooming it gloriously in the fat. Chicken thighs went next, skin down to start. It was a wonderful combination—chicken fat and floral turmeric cooking together into a rich fond on the pan.

She used water to deglaze the pan, pulling that richness into a broth. She then flipped the chicken before adding rice, corn and tomatoes and letting it all cook just until the rice was tender. Then, just as the dish finished, a second copious dose of turmeric. As we’ve learned around the world, adding the same spice at different times during cooking extracts different flavors from the same ingredient with each addition.

The result was rich and deliciously earthy with turmeric and sweet with tomato, all of it balanced by savory chicken, the tender, starchy rice sopping it all up. Which once again convinced me that if you want to know a people and place, taste their comfort food. Taste their chicken and rice.