Portugal – Learning to Eat

Portugal

Baccala!

July 29, 2010 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: comfort food, family dinner, fish, new food, Portugal, unfamiliar food

by Caroline

Our stay in Portugal was planned as a respite, a no-agenda, unscheduled interlude without a lot of sight-seeing. It’s not that Lisbon and Sintra don’t offer a lot to see, but we know that with kids you can only be a tourist for so long before rebellion sets in and you risk finding yourselves stuck in a relatively expensive vacation rental with children who refuse to do anything but lie on the floor and color (or worse). We’ve learned to pace ourselves so that everyone gets to see and do interesting things, everyone gets some down time, and no one gets (too) cranky. It’s not an exact science (nothing in parenting is) but we’re getting better at it every year.

So, we puttered around the house and garden. The kids drew and played with stomp rockets and practiced their headstands. I picked ruffly leaves of kale from under the laundry line and admired the amazing harvest of red peppers:

We didn’t hurry (well, except for the trip to the ER).

And that gave us all the more time to make baccala, which is pretty much the national dish of Portugal. Or I should say, it would have given us more time to make baccala, but in fact the meal arrived on the table without my input or participation at all. So while I would love to be able to share the recipe here, as well as pictures of how it all came together, would have loved to be part of the process, asking questions about how long to soak the dried cod, who taught her the recipe, how many variations she’s made or eaten, Ursula’s mother-in-law soaked the cod, and rinsed it and soaked it again until it was tender, starting a couple days before our dinner. Then she and Ursula pulled it all together, chopping onions, potatoes, parsley and olives.

It all happened in the background while the kids played and we relaxed. It gave me a wonderful sense of being cared for, which of course made the meal especially delicious. So while I can’t tell you how to make baccala, I can tell you that the soft and salty layers of salt cod and potatoes and onions, eaten at a table with family and friends, make for a most unexpected and wonderful comfort food. And I can tell you that it is the perfect meal after an afternoon scrambling over walls of a ruined 9th century Moorish castle — but you shouldn’t wait for an outing like that to eat it.

A Bad-Good Day

July 19, 2010 By caroline in Uncategorized Tags: breakfast, comfort food, eating out, Portugal, restaurants, sickness, snacks, sweets, vegetarian

by Caroline

When my friend Ursula moved to Portugal for a year and said she had room for us all to come stay, I started looking into airfares. When she started posting pictures of Portuguese pastry on her website, I booked the tickets. She wrote me about her favorite pastry shop in Lisbon, and said we could stop in on our way home from the airport.

Now I happen to think that all food is stories, but the story behind Pasteis de Belem is a particularly good one, involving nuns and a secret recipe over two hundred years old.

There was no way I was missing a trip to this bakery. But our flight arrived too late in the afternoon to go out for what’s really a morning pastry snack, and besides, there was a medieval fair to attend. We kept the pastry shop high on the to-do list and went to bed.

Not many hours later, Ben appeared at the side of my bed. Before I could even think to curse the jet lag which I assumed had woken him, his face startled me wide awake. He was grimacing in pain, sweaty, crying. He clutched his left side and moaned as he crawled in next to me. I thought at first that he’d gotten sick from his candy apple dinner the night before, but he insisted it wasn’t his stomach, but a spot lower down, on the left. I flashed to countless readings of Madeleine and Tony googled “appendicitis,” which confirmed everything we were witnessing. I woke Ursula, and her husband drove us into Lisbon, quiet in the pre-dawn hours, to visit the pediatric ER.

And this is where the story suddenly improves. Not just because the walls of the ER were painted with a space theme that delighted my child, and not because the wonderful doctor addressed herself, in perfect English, directly to Ben as she examined him carefully, but because somehow his symptoms all disappeared. Two hours later, instead of sitting by a hospital bed while Ben recovered from an appendectomy, we were sitting in the just-opened, nearly empty Pasteis de Belem, enjoying a sleepy but amazingly delicious breakfast:

The pastry is like a cross between phyllo and pie crust, incredibly light, buttery and flakey, while the egg custard filling is light and not very sweet; the pasteis are served with shakers of cinnamon and powdered sugar (if you get the pastry to go, you’re given perfect little packets of the toppings). They look a little burned on top from being run under a broiler, which just caramelizes the sugar in the filling and gives the pastry topping an unexpected extra crunch. We ate plates full at the bakery, took more home to the rest of the family, and then resumed our vacation, just so grateful that we could.