The Portuguese Kitchen

I THINK IT'S IN OUR BLOOD, YOU KNOW?’ Baena laughs. ‘We have always loved those kind of melting pots. If you want a cuisine that can really reflect the trend for fusion cuisine historically, Portuguese is it.’ The Portuguese have long been a nation who have travelled and taken goods to and from other countries. Becoming a world power in Europe’s ‘Age of Discovery’ in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal had colonies in South America, Africa, Asia and Australasia. Portuguese explorers were responsible for introducing chili peppers from the New World (South America) to India and Pakistan and, in return, mangoes from India to South America. ‘We mixed up the flora of the world a little bit,’ Baena smiles. As a result, Portuguese cuisine includes elements from all of these lands. So, today, it is common to eat curry in Portugal, but, whereas in other European countries this might be considered Indian food, there it is part of ‘native’ tradition. There is much crossover too, with, for example, Brazilian muqueca being enjoyed in Portugal under the name of caldeirada, and Portuguese migas being known in Brazil as vatapá. Who had what first is uncertain, but does it really matter?

A good pub quiz fact is that Portugal also invented tempura. Known as peixinhos da horta – literally ‘little garden fish’ – it was made with green beans and a wheat flour based batter and eaten during Lent as a replacement for fish and meat. It was introduced to Japan by Jesuit missionaries in the 16th century, possibly alongside some other cultural exchanges, including fire weapons, the way of building cities on hills, and linguistic items such as Portuguese obrigado which corresponds to Japanese arigatō (‘thank you’).

Within Portugal, multicultural history has also left its traces in culinary tradition. One particularly popular food is the spicy pork sausage known as chouriço. This is made by firstly seasoning the pork meat, traditionally in large clay bowls, and mixing it with bell pepper paste, garlic and various other spices. Once the chouriço has been made, the seasoning that’s left over in the bowl, along with the fat that came off the pork, is mixed with flour and stuffed into tripe. This delicacy, named after the flour it contains, is known as farinheira. Traditionally, they are hung over the fireplace in Portuguese homes. Nowadays, Portugal is a largely Catholic country, but, in the past, it had a sizeable Jewish community, many of whom were refugees from Spain. During the 16th century Inquisition, Jews had to adopt Christianity in order to remain. The court used to go and visit homes to check whether families were secretly still practising Judaism, and one way in which stalwart Jews sought to pull the wool over the Inquisitors’ eyes was to make a special type of farinheira, using game meat rather than pork, and hang these over the fireplace instead. Such sausages are known as alheira (the name deriving from alho, ‘garlic’).

It is religious customs in monasteries that we have to thank for some of Portugal’s more sweet-toothed delicacies. Back in the monastic heyday, vast quantities of egg whites were needed by the monks for two purposes: to make the host and to starch the laundry. As such, eggs yolks were always left over in abundance. Mixed with equally large measures of sugar, a myriad of sweets and desserts were born which remain popular to the present day.

Another sweet dish common in Portugal is rice pudding. This is made with Carolino Rice, which is grown in flat regions in the centre north of the country, near Lisbon and Coimbra, and, of course, near to a river. This rice – a short, plump, white grain – is very versatile and has a great capacity to absorb flavours. It can produce different textures for risotto, ‘soupy rice’ (another Portuguese specialty), and pudding. Low in amylose content, this rice becomes pasty and tight upon cooking. It is not very easy to work with until you understand its properties, but, once you do, it becomes very all-purpose. It is also ideal for the monkfish and rice dish known as malandrinho, which requires the rice to become creamy and smooth.

Mealtimes in Portugal are traditionally very important. Breakfast is fairly simple: just bread and butter, milk and coffee or tea, and perhaps some fruit. But lunch is typically a substantial meal, authentically served with wine, although less so nowadays because of the need for workers to return to the office in the afternoon. Baena recalls how a traditional – and fairly typical for any Portuguese family of that time – lunch at his great aunt’s house, would comprise six or seven courses. Supper would then be an altogether lighter affair of biscuits, cakes and scrambled eggs.

Although somewhat adapted to fit the modern person’s working schedule, lunch and dinner are still two key moments in the Portuguese day, served respectively from 13.00-14.30/15.00 and 20.00-22.00. If you make a lunch appointment, it’s for an hour at least – none of the grab-a-sandwich 15-minute-tops business lunch culture of the UK and USA.

Food unsurprisingly also plays a large part in traditional seasonal and religious festivities. In the north of the country, at Christmas, it is common to eat octopus, but elsewhere there is usually a two course meal of bacalhau (dried cod) followed by turkey. It is said that there exist some 365 recipes for bacalhau – one for each day of the year – but actually there are even more: maybe in the region of 600-700 would be a more accurate estimate. A longstanding Portuguese favourite, the cod is dried because it is not actually native to the Atlantic coasts and needs importing. The first stage is to rehydrate the cod, so that it gains around 60% more weight, a process which, depending on size, may take 24-36 hours. When it is ready, the flesh will fall apart very easily. In the north, a popular recipe is to mix the fish with fresh olive oil, straight out of the press, creating something like a confit, which is served with potatoes and kale. Further south, it is more commonly grilled with garlic and olive oil, or boiled and served with potatoes, vegetables and again – this seems to be the common denominator – lots of olive oil. One tasca recipe – traditionally a snack for poor people – involves mixing the cod with olives, pickles, onion, chopped parsley, chopped coriander and olive oil, and serving it like a ceviche. The recipe most popular with visitors to Portugal is known as golden bacalhau (or bacalhau dourado). It consists of very thinly sliced ‘straw’ potatoes and shredded bacalhau, served with a mixture of olive oil, onion and garlic, stewed, mixed altogether and finished with eggs, from whence the golden colour.

Turkey, although eaten quite a lot in Portugal as risotto or schnitzel, at Christmas is traditionally roasted and commonly stuffed with other meats, nuts and dried fruits, and served with potatoes and vegetables. The Christmas meal is eaten on 24th December before attending midnight mass. Upon returning home, a meal of sweet things is served: deep fried dumplings with sweet potato or squash, or sometimes just deep fried dough with cinnamon and sugar. Presents, traditionally brought by the baby Jesus, latterly more often by Santa Claus, are then exchanged. The main dish at Easter is lamb, especially Alentejo lamb, which has an amazing flavour because of having eaten straw for most of the year due to the region’s sunny and dry climate. There is also a special Easter soup made in Alentejo, consisting of turkey stock, thickened with roasted semolina, served with an emulsion of egg yolk and lemon juice, and finished with chopped parsley. A summer seasonal specialty is sardines, available in June, around the feast days of St. Anthony, John and Peter, and served on toasted corn bread with roasted bell peppers, potatoes, crispy green salad, tomato, coriander, oregano and olive oil. As you remove the skin and bones, the flavour from the sardine and the oil comes through into the bread.

Red mullet is another fish much enjoyed in Portugal. Its taste can vary radically, depending on the depth of the water in which it has been living, and, in the fishing villages around Lisbon, there is great variety in this factor – on one side of the city, the villages have deep water, on the other side, there are more sandbanks. Fishmongers and chefs therefore work together to source the perfect mullet for the recipe at hand.

In Lisbon and the south, throughout spring and summer, snails are popular. In the autumn and winter months, game comes into season, and partridge, wild boar and wild pigeons are enjoyed. How much is trapped, however, is carefully controlled, much as is also the case these days with fishing. Yellow-tail and bluefin tuna, for example, must be line caught, and there is a limit to how many specimen may be caught per year. So as to have completed their lifecycles and produced offspring, the fish should be relatively old – and large. They typically weigh in at between 300-500 kg each and so reeling them in to the ship is no mean feat. This also means that a catch of 60 per year is plenty to meet culinary demand. A migratory species, tuna can swim up to 400 km per day, and this results in their meat being very vascularised and red. Another popular fish caught off the Atlantic coast is swordfish, which, even without its sword, can weigh up to 700 kg.

More terrifyingly still, the islands of the Azores, although having fewer fish varieties available off their shores than the continental coast, boast, as their specialty, the giant squid, which, at up to 5 metres in diameter, is very dangerous until it arrives in a safely digestible form on your plate.

A further longstanding tradition of the Azores –volcanic islands which, although no longer erupting, remain active – is to use the holes in the ground, where water still boils naturally below the surface, as points on which to place your pan of stew for the perfect slow cook. Tip of the day is to get there very early, as there can be some competition over who gets whose hole. Sitting watching your pan, you might then want to enjoy a cup of tea, since the islands are the only place in Europe where tea is grown – another legacy of colonial trading. Themselves colonised by the continental Portuguese, the Azores also have a small community of Irish, making them typical of Portugal as a whole: ‘a small country with many multicultural influences.’ Baena, whose fusion style we can now after all recognise as Portuguese through and through, goes on to describe his native gastronomy as ‘like a hidden pearl in the ethnic cuisines of Europe.’

And the most important thing, an outcome of perhaps less recent international exchange than in times of yore: ‘If you want to eat real Portuguese cuisine, you still have to go to Portugal.’