I didn't realize, until researching this meal, just how different Portuguese food is from Spanish. Foolish me, it's really something quite different — I can't remember ever seeing collard greens, allspice, or corn flour playing a role in Spanish food! It's too bad that, outside of New England where there's a substantial Portuguese population thanks to the whaling trade way back when, you just don't see much in the way of Portuguese restaurants, because it's really quite good.
This meal was also Laura's birthday celebration! The friends around the table this year were Deena, Craig, Chelsea, Rachael, Laura, Alley, Annie, Suja, and Douglas.
Broa | Corn and what bread | Recipe
This bread is just perfect for dunking into soup. It's sturdy but not chewy, with a crust that's just strong enough to hold together but doesn't resist too hard to soaking. It's got a subtle nuttiness too, thanks to the corn.
What intrigues the etymologist in me is that, although it's the specific name of a bread made with a New World grain, the name comes from an ancient Germanic language's word for bread. I wonder what broa was before corn, and how that differed from pão, that is, bread.
Caldo verde | Collard and potato soup | Recipe
Salt cod is considered the most iconic ingredient in Portuguese cuisine, but the national dish is this humble yet tasty soup of potato and collards. In fact, it's so common that throughout Portugal you'll find a purpose-designed machine that feeds collard leaves through a hand-cranked disc of blades to achieve the whisker-thin slices required. The thinness is essential for it to cook quickly, because bigger pieces of the tough green can take quite a long time to soften up. Of course I didn't have access to such a disc, and a food processor would have made a hash of it, so I had no choice but to carefully hone my best knife and chiffonade like mad. Luckily, I had collards in the yard that I was able to put into service, but my goodness, a pound of medium-sized greens is a lot of leaves.
It turned out great! Even though there's not much in the way of flavoring, I credit cooling and reheating with helping the inherent flavors develop. The only modification I made was to cook the sausage separately rather than using its grease to build the soup, to respect a few friends' dietary needs. Maybe it'd have been even better with some linguiça grease in there, but I didn't miss it.
Bacalhau à Bras | Salt cod with fried potatoes, eggs and olives | Recipe
Some have observed how curious it is that Portugal's waters are teeming with fish and seafood right offshore, yet without question the most popular fish there is harvested in subarctic waters and packed in salt. Many Portuguese recipe sites quote the old chestnut that there are over 365 recipes for salt cod, so you can eat a different one every day and not repeat for a year. Indeed, there's a boatload, so to speak, of ways to serve the fish, many of which are named after the person or place responsible for the invention. Because bacalhau doesn't need to be cooked, you can throw it into just about anything, whether as a whole fillet or flaked.
After looking through a dizzying array of recipes, I ended up on this one as an inventive combination that became canonical. While I don't much like frying to order, I don't mind as much doing it in advance, so I did the potatoes a bit ahead of time. The rest is essentially a stir-fry with onions, those potatoes, the flaked salt cod, and at the very end scrambled eggs cooked just long enough to be done but not yet an omelet. You drop in the olives at the end. We didn't end up with a good photo, but it hardly matters, because this isn't a photogenic dish. But it's tasty and satisfying and I can attest that it's good re-fried the morning after!
Alcatra | Pot roast in white wine | Recipe
Portugal is more than a notch on the southwestern corner of the European continent, with substantial populations in both Madeira and the Azores Islands. I decided to use the meat dish to represent this other aspect to the country, and I found a great one in this pot roast. It doesn't have too many ingredients, but they're all interesting — allspice! bacon! two bottles of white wine! — and given the eight hours of cooking, all of them have a full working day to lend all their flavor to the broth and the meat. This was just so delicious, the meat tearing apart with barely an effort, and a mouth-filling but far from overwhelming flavor. If you make this, make a lot, because you can throw the leftovers into so many things.
Pasteis de nata | Egg tarts | Recipe
I think every single person I've mentioned this meal to who's been to Portugal has asked if we'd have egg tarts. Of course we had to, it truly is Portugal's international calling card in the pastry world. The national airline serves these in coach, that's how iconic they are for the country.
I gotta say, we clearly didn't quite get it. We definitely cut a big corner by using store-bought puff pastry rather than making our own laminated dough, but I didn't have the time and I very much didn't have the inclination to go through all that folding and rolling. And also these things are supposed to be baked at a blistering 800° or so, while our oven tops out at 500°. But Deena, who took the lead on this dish, did her best given the handicaps, and they turned out particularly pretty. (Protip: you get that nice crust form by putting a disc in the bottom of the muffin tin and pushing out and up!) Flavor-wise, those who'd been, including Deena, said it was a tasty, but far from great, result. Oh well.