Portuguese Cuisine

The Cuisine of Portugal

As any native or visitor will tell you, Portugal is home to one of the world’s great culinary traditions.  The people of Portugal place great importance on food and it holds a central place in the social life of the country.  Gatherings of family and friends revolve around food whether they take place at home or in restaurants.  Much of the complexity of Portugal’s food culture dates back to its colonial past.  In the 15^th Century, Prince Henry the navigator, ordered his explorers to bring back any new and exotic fruits, nuts and plants from their travels, resulting in the introduction into Europe of tomatoes, potatoes, chillis, coffee, cashew and Brazil nuts as well as an array of spices from the middle and far east.  Spices such as cinnamon, star anise, turmeric, coriander and cardomom all have a place in modern Portuguese cuisine, dating back from the age of discovery.
 
Today the national dish is Bacalhau, dried and salted cod, made firm and delicious by the curing process.  Bachalau dates back to the 15^th century, when the Portuguese began to fish off the coast of Newfoundland.  Salting the catch was the best way to bring it home.  It is said there are 365 different ways to cook Bachalau, but the most popular are "bacalhau á gomes de sá" (cooked in a casserole with thinly sliced potatoes and onions, then garnished with hard-boiled eggs and black olives), "bacalhau à brás" and "bacalhau dourado" (two quite similar recipes composed of scrambled eggs, onions and shoe-string potatoes), "bacalhau á conde de guarda" (salt cod creamed with mashed potatoes) and "bolinhos de bacalhau" (codfish croquettes, a particularly popular hors d'oeuvre).
 

 
Soups and stews also make up part of the menu of Portugal.  Fishermen's soup, Caldeirada is made using sea-water, tomatoes, onions and garlic, lean and oily fish in roughly equal proportion (such as cod and sardines), and if the catch is good, squid and/or octopus too. Caldeiradas tend vary from day to day depending upon whatever the fishermen's nets have fetched up.  Green soup, Caldo Verde is another national dish. Caldo Verde has kale as it's key ingredient. The dish is a jade-green soup brimming with potatoes, onion, garlic and noodle-thin shreds of kale. Sometimes it's fortified with slices of chouriço or linguiça sausage. It is the delicate shreds of kale which makes caldo verde resemble molten jade.
Next to Caldo Verde Portugal's most famous soup is probably Açorda á Alentejana, a coriander-strewn, bread-thickened, garlic soup garnished with boiled egg.
 

Wherever you go in Portugal, you will have a choice of some of Europe’s best wine.  Most famous perhaps are Port and Madeira, the fortified sweet wines popular worldwide.  However they are far from the only Portuguese wines deserving attention.
 
Portuguese wines can be divided into two basic categories: vinho verde and vinho maduro. Vinhos maduros are made for aging and maturing in the bottle. Vinhos verdes, or "green wine" are very young and are unique to Portugal.  These distinctive wines come from the Minho province in the northwest tip of the country.  Green wine can be white or red, green meaning young in this sense.
Vinho maduro are the older mature wines, the higher quality varietals of which are denoted as Reserva and Garrafeira and are usually more expensive.
Colares, to the west of Lisbon, on the shores of the Atlantic, makes some of the most unusual red wine in the world. The vines are planted in the sand of the Atlantic shoreline and require intensive care in their cultivation.
Moscatel de Setúbal is a famous Portuguese dessert wine. Grown in an area south of Lisbon, across the bridge on the Arrabida Peninsula, the wine is named after the nearby port of Setúbal.