Post
by Bird on a Fire » Wed Apr 21, 2021 10:30 pm
The Portuguese are incredibly proud of their culinary heritage, and it is, for the most part, what is sometimes called "peasant food" - simple food cooked well.
Like, if you go to a seafood place and order a fish, you will get a fish that's been grilled on charcoal. With the eyes and skin and bones and stuff. (They eat things like sardines whole, like seagulls do. I don't think they cough up pellets, though.)
A lot of meat comes in white bread. Very occasionally there's a simple sauce (probably tomato based), but normally just olive oil, salt, maybe some lemon or vinegar on a side salad. It's not easy to do vegetarian versions. Everything is served with rice and potatoes - possibly fries, possibly boiled, both if you're a large group. And bread. Cooked vegetables are rare in restaurants, outside of the cherished caldo verde ("green soup"), which is cabbage and potatoes and water.
The wine is excellent, but often quite haphazardly produced. The industry is rapidly modernising, and suddenly winning loads of awards for stuff other than port. And people drink a lot of it unpretensiously, often just ordering "red" or "white" without asking the name or grape variety or anything.
A typical lunchtime meal deal here might be €3.50, and go: green soup, grilled meat in a bread, possibly a potato option, coffee (espresso) and a drink. The drink can be a can of coke (etc), a small beer, or a 0.5 l carafe of wine. (The beer is either garbage, or very expensive hipster artesenal stuff).
But people have a strong sense of food being tied to geography. The best sheep cheese is from this region. The best sausage is from this kind of pig in that kind of forest down there. Want to quaff a light white wine in the sun? Up here.
And desserts! Every time I tell someone where I live, or which random town I'm looking at birds near tomorrow, they always specific a kind of cake or pastry that is famous in that town. Literally every town has its own pastry, and visitors seek them out. They're all good.
It's difficult to export. There are very few Portuguese restaurants because there's no real concept to exploit. You can grill a mackerel in Detroit, but nobody is going to consider that "Portuguese cuisine".
And there's been no postcolonial adoption of spices. Portugal kicked off its imperialism by monopolising the sea route to the spice islands of Asia, undercutting whichever other empire had the monopoly over the land route and was taxing the arse out of it.
But while the empire is remembered with wistful pride, try and find a Goan or Timorese or Mozambiquean restaurants or dishes. (There's quite a few Cabo Verdean places around, to be fair, and they are fantastic! And clearly also an influence on north Brazilian cuisine, which makes sense). There's probably more Mozambiquean food in London than in Portugal - Nandos dresses up as Portuguese, but it's actually Mozambique food and run by a South African. Peri-peri is the Ronga word for "pepper" and was imported via Portuguese. Every restaurant has a bottle of piripiri sauce with the salt and pepper - but that's it, really. Well, and there's sugar in all the desserts.
The UK could easily harness an entirely wholesome sense of national and regional appreciation around cuisine. Everyone likes eating. There's loads of interesting local variations, influences from regional history (and herstory), plus a global story to tell.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.