Cuisine

Portuguese

Cozinha portuguesa

Salt and the Atlantic still organise the pantry. Bacalhau — dried salt cod — is soaked back to life and cooked in dozens of ways; it is more typical than the two sandwiches in this catalog. A bifana is a thin pork sandwich, often from a garlicky, sometimes beer-or-wine pan sauce, eaten standing up. A francesinha is a Porto construction: wet-cured meats and sausage in bread, smothered in a beer-tomato sauce and cheese, usually with chips. Both are urban, working plates. They sit beside grilled sardines, caldo verde and custard tarts that should still blister on top.

Atlantic preservation made salt cod a national protein long after the fishing grounds changed. Convent bakeries produced egg-yolk sweets, including pastéis de nata. Chilli came back from the empire and stayed as piri-piri on grilled chicken. The francesinha is a mid-twentieth-century Porto sandwich with a claimed French-Belgian ancestor and a thoroughly local sauce. The bifana is older café food. Portuguese cooking also travelled to Brazil and parts of Africa; those kitchens went their own way with dendê, coconut and different chilli. Do not read the sandwich list as the whole country.

Olive oil, garlic, bay, paprika and a lot of potato. Grilling fish is a summer method; salt cod is year-round. Soups are a meal. A bifana should taste of pork and garlic, not of a generic steak roll. A francesinha is messy on purpose; the sauce is the point. Custard tarts want a shatter of pastry and a burnt-cream top.