As we discussed in my previous paper on this subject, the secret to making the best chicken in the world is Piri Piri. If you don’t know by now, Piri Piri sauce is to Portuguese Chicken what Cagney is to Lacey. B1 is to B2. The Tardis is to Doctor Who. Without a great Piri Piri, chicken is just chicken. It has no mojo.
The origins of the sauce come from Angola and Mozambique, who both have ancient versions of chilli sauce and who customarily use chillies in their cooking. You could almost say that chilli occurs no where else in Portuguese cooking, at least only as an exotic ingredient and certainly not in any other national, fundamental dish.
In trying to crack the recipe par excellence I’ve gone to neighbours, to friends, their parents and grandparents, to restaurants and to the internet. All recipes for Molho Piri Piri have as their basis malagueta chillies, olive oil and whisky. The most common variations are using a different alcohol or vinegar, and adding lemon, garlic, bay and other spices.
I’ve tried a few now and I was happy with my own lemony brew which I shared before. But now I have turned to the master (or mistress if you prefer), Elvira, and it is her recipe which I will declare the perfect piri piri sauce.
It is just goddam delish. Not too hot, thick enough to stick, and mighty tasty. Note however that Elvira refers to her chillies as piri-piris, and most other recipes refer to malaguetas as the variety to use for this sauce, so here I have specified malaguetas too. I’ve had too many different explanations about whether malaguetas are piri piris and whether or not piri piri is just the correct translation of the english word chilli, which we spell in a variety of ways further illustrating the elasticity of language. Blah-de-blah-blah. Maybe Elvira herself will drop by and give us the final word on this piri piri / malagueta lingistic phenomenon. Ditto Isabel.
8 red malaguetas (about 8-10 cms long, finger width, but not sweet like Thai chillies) 3 green malaguetas teaspoon of sweet paprika zest of one lemon clove of garlic 200ml extra virgin olive oil pinch of rock salt wine glass of either balsamic vinegar, port, brandy or scotch.
Even in this situation I will still only use recipes as a guide. Not because I don’t think Elvira’s is perfect, but because I know how I like it. I can never see the point in only one clove of garlic, for example. I used three. My lemon zest seemed a bit skimpy so I added some more, and I chose a nice bottle of scotch for the punch, giving a small glass to the sauce and the rest to me. But one day I will try the balsamic version. Balsamic & chicken sounds wild and amazing.
You put all the ingredients into a blender or a food processor or a bamix thingy and grind it up until it looks good. I marinated my chicken in it for a few hours before barbequing.
Super seriously yummo, and it also makes a boring pork chop very worthy.
Visitors are invariably impressed that every morning a little van comes by to sell us fresh bread and cakes. I guess it reminds them of the milkman who delivered daily in our childhoods. It’s a sweet, old fashioned service that trumps the idea that things were better in the old days.
We also have a frozen-things truck that comes on Fridays and a fish truck that comes on Wednesdays. Some villages have more – maybe also a veggie truck. Where I was houseminding the fish truck came three times a week, which really meant you never had to leave the house. And that’s of course why they exist. With the villages of Portugal mostly populated by old people, many of whom don’t drive, these deliveries are more like a necessity. Sure, many of them are also living out of their gardens and chicken coops, but who has sardines in their fish ponds?
It’s one of things my dad would have liked about Portugal had he been alive long enough to visit. My dad loved fish. And while he also liked to make that special, private trip to the fish shop on a Friday evening, I’m sure he would’ve been tickled pink at the sound of the truck’s horn right at his door.
I am, in any case. I love it most when I’ve forgotten it’s Wednesday, and then suddenly there are all these choices for dinner. Will it be sardines, fish soup or grilled salmon? Fish and chips? Vietnamese salt and pepper squid? Fish is so great, my dad reckoned, because you can get away with so few other ingredients. Lemon, butter, salt and pepper, bit of parsley… anything else might be superfluous for a nice piece of fish. I’m sure the Portuguese are of the same school. My neighbours almost always only buy sardines, and they are always just grilled with some garlic, salt and olive oil. They don’t even bother scaling, gutting or chopping off the head! Rustic as hell, and honestly, the way they taste straight off the coals, I wonder why I go to all the fuss I that I do.
Still, I like the versatility of fish. I like making it Asian or Italian or even Cajun. And even though the squid is only about €6 kilo, and the sardines about €3 kilo, it always feels like a bit of mid-week luxury. And the pets love it too. Once while preparing dinner, Mao and I scoffed down a whole steak of salmon, sashimi style, before it could make it into the pan. The neighbours were in shock when I told them – Raw fish?!? Vais morrer! Even The Wookie gets in on the fish guts and heads, provided I’ve fried them up with a bit of garlic and oil, bien sur.
Stuffed Squid
The inspiration for this comes from a great little Italian restaurant called La Locanda, in Clovelly in Sydney. It’s the kind of place everyone would like at the end of their street, a not-too-up-itself but good & authentic Italian bistro.
In winter (and I’m sure this is some culinary faux pas, but I don’t care, it works both ways) I swap the white wine for red, which stains the squid in a nice way when it’s cooking.
2 or 3 squid tubes per person, but it really depends on the size of them… stuffing:
half cup rice, cooked
an onion
garlic
a carrot, finely diced
lemon zest
red capsicum, finely diced
sauce:
half tin tomatoes
cup white wine
some parsley and lemon to serve.
To clean the squid, remove the tentacles and bits from inside the body and peel off the fine skin. Cut off the head at the beak, remove the beak, being careful not to disturb the ink sac, and rinse well in cold water, but don’t leave the squid in the water or they’ll soak it up like a sponge. Chop up the tentacles and mix with all the stuffing ingredients.
I have a trick for stuffing both squid and cannelloni tubes, and it goes like this. Stick the end of a funnel into the tube, put the stuffing in the funnel and poke it through with a chopstick. Be careful when filling squid not to fill them much more than half way, as the tubes shrink as they are cooking and they’ll squeeze out their filling like they’ve vomited into the cooking pan. Not a good look.
Plop the filled tubes and any leftover stuffing into a frypan or a small oven dish and throw on the tomatoes and wine and some salt and pepper. The idea with squid (and their friends octopus and cuttlefish) is to either cook them very fast or very slowly. So, on high on the cooktop for 10 minutes, or on low in the oven (or fireplace as I do) for about 40 minutes to an hour. I prefer the slow method for the flavour.
You could serve it with a salad, but I usually have it as is. Yum.
Pan fried sardines with parmesan crust.
Tia Maria once asked me how I’d cooked my sardines the night before. Once I’d shared this slightly fiddly recipe, she just shook her head in wonder. Sardines and cheese?
First I gently scale the little fish with a steak knife, then chop off their heads and gut them. Then I flatten them out on a chopping board, sometimes removing the spine, sometimes not, depending on how big they are and how chunky the bones. Then I wash them and leave them on a tea towel to drain. I make a 50/50 mix of toasted breadcrumbs and grated parmesan (actually the powdery fine stuff is good for this because it’s dry). I rub in a crushed garlic or two, some parsley, and season it well. Then I dunk the fillets in milk or egg, or if they are still damp, nothing at all, and then dredge them in the breadcrumbs mixture. Then you pan fry them in about a centimetre of hot olive oil (or a mix of olive and vegetable oil to get the oil hot enough for a cleaner, faster fry) and serve them with a salad and lemon wedges.
If they are small sardines, they’d be great for finger food at a party as all the little bones are perfectly edible and very good for you. They are also excellent the next day in a fresh crusty roll from the bread truck.
Apparently my fish soup is all right. I like it for it’s simplicity: just a steamy bowl of broth and some clean fresh fish. This is another recipe in the Saudades for Yens category; when I´m missing the food of a great Vietnamese restaurant in Sydney. So this fish soup, while not a true Phở, has been Vietnam-ised.
for the stock:
2 leeks
a big onion
garlic a carrot and/or stick of celery, finely diced
whole black peppercorns
chopped parsley
half cup white wine or sherry (or jerupiga)
A mix of filleted fish – as in a calderada sold by the fishmonger. A mix of pink and white fleshed fish is good, and even better if there are some bones and skin still attached to the pieces.
for finishing the soup:
half an onion, finely sliced in half rounds
150g per person of rice noodles
bean sprouts
a big handful of Vietnamese mint or Thai basil, if you can get it, or instead I use a mix of coriander & mint
cut limes
a shot of fish sauce or nuoc nam
Fry up the onion, sliced leek and garlic. Throw in the rinsed fish, the carrot and peppercorns and a litre of water. Let the stock simmer gently for a hour or so. Drain off the solids, rescuing the fish pieces. Separate the flesh from the bones and return these to the pot with the drained stock and the sliced onion. Cover the noodles in boiling water and then stack the bowls with hot noodles and sprouts. Pour on the stock and fish, and serve with the lime quarter, nuoc nam and a pile of the herb greens. Yum.
I first fell in love with the olive tree in Greece. On the Peloponnesian plains thousands of orderly planted cool grey-green trees, punctuated by lines of stone walls, provide much appreciated shade for goats and sheep. The still landscape is silent except for the throbbing of heat and insects. It is a biblical, olympian and everlasting scene.
For some people, palm trees are the symbol of holiday and escape, but for me, olive trees are the sign that I’m deep in foreign lands, far away from home. So when I first saw my house, with its view of an olive grove, I was well persuaded. It pushed my magic button, so to speak.
Although I’m not so passionate about eating olives, last year I was still pretty happy about picking my own fruit, and then preparing and marinating my very own olives. Especially as this variety isn’t usually for the table, it’s for making oil for cooking.
This year I got into the process of making olive oil. It’s a perfectly simple and unadulterated process. You pick the olives at the same time as pruning of the vertical and central branches of the trees. With these fruit-yielding branches on the ground, they are stripped or beaten of fruit, which collect on a massive tarp.
The olives are separated from the leaf refuse and bagged – the bags are a standard size which are bought beforehand from the lagar, the co-op olive press or factory. At the lagar, your consignment is counted and given a place in the queue. At some lagars you can immediately exchange your crop for the fixed rate of exchange for oil. You can reserve a time for your crop to be put through the press exclusively and not mixed with anyone’s else’s olives. Ideal if you’d like to keep your olives away from chemicals, different varieties or olives of lesser quality. At this lagar, exclusive pressing is the standard procedure. Everyone receives the oil from their own olives.
washing
The olives are first washed then mashed. The mashed mix is then heated to about 32-35 degrees, and the warm pulp is spread over circular mats which are stacked onto the press’ bobbin. The bobbin is put into the press, where it is raised, and pressed. The oil/water mix that is released from the olives is then siphoned through a gravity separator and filtered through a centrifuge which separates the oil from the water. The oil is poured out into jugs, then poured into drums that you’ve provided. Our crop of 524 kilos of olives was converted to 59 litres of pure, chemical free, extra virgin, cold pressed, liquid gold. (Yes, punters, it is organic – my neighbours don’t waste any more labour or cash spraying chemicals around.)
pressing mats
59 litres should last Tia Maria a year, feeding her crew of nine. Sounds ok, so long as you don’t put a cash value on the family’s labour: it took 3 people about 2 weeks to bring in this amount. At minimum wage that’s about €675 in labour: and even at the lager retail price of €5 per litre, it’s a poor peasant’s business.
the separation process
However, because this oil is the real deal, a true premium product, direct, micro-production and cloudy – this type of oil is currently at the forefront of a wave and is sold to quality produce-oriented London restaurants for £16/litre or more, and that’s where things start to make sense. If only Australia wasn’t so far away…
the real deal
marinated fresh black olives
There are a thousand variations for preparing olives. Here’s what I did last year, and they were delicious! The preparation recipe is from stephanie alexander’s the cook’s companion, and the marinade is my own.
Put the fresh olives in a covered bucket of water for 40 days, changing the water every two days. Drain the olives and then completely cover them in rock salt for two days. Rinse and then pack into sterilised jars. I made a variety of different flavours using balsamic vinegar, red wine vinegar, garlic, chilli, lemon, dried oregano, herbs de provence and olive oil, using half/half oil/vinegar mix. I left them in the marinade for a least a month before eating them.
This year, I put the olives in a 1/3 salt water (brine) solution for 5 weeks, changing the brine once a week. It helps to use a lot of solution so the olives are well covered and to weigh them down with a plate so they are always under the water. I stored them in the dark, covered. Then I rinsed them for two days, changing the water a few times each day. I made two batches, one with red wine vinegar and garlic and the other with balsamic and piri-piri, with half olive oil.
The distilling of wine is an ancient practice which continues to be popular across South America, Spain and here in Portugal. Maybe the most well known wine-spirit is the Italian digestive grappa, which Portuguese aguardente tastes most like.
You can make aguardente from sugar cane, fruit, potatoes, grains and even honey. In that case we would call it rum (sugar cane), vodka (sometimes potatoes), whisky (grains), or gin (juniper berries). A wide variety of herbs and spices are often added as flavourings, and the distilled spirit may be aged in wood which alters its colour and flavour, but essentially all spirits start life in the same way. In my region aguardente is specifically made from the crushed grapes and juice of the morangueiro vine.
If you are lucky, you’ve inherited or bought a house with a still, or alambique in Portuguese. If I’ve learnt something from the wine making experience, if you have an old set-up, then you’ve got the technology; keep it. And use it! My neighbour’s alambique is more than 100 years old which indicates it’s been thoroughly tried and tested and it still works. My neighbour’s son has heard stories from his grandfather about his grandfather using this very still. He was the master. But it could have gone much further back than that. Nobody knows.
.
The still is made up of 4 parts. First below, the fireplace at floor level, and above it the copper still. From the top of the still, a copper pipe descends through a cooling bath, and out the other side carrying the condensation of the heated wine, into a bottle. This clear liquid has about 20-25% alcohol and can be drunk now ‘raw’ or aged either in bottles or in oak barrels. As it ages, the spirit gradually changes from clear to honey-brown, and its flavour and alcohol content will develop. Some aguardentes have an alcoholic potency of 60 or 70%.
Getting to that is a very simple process. Pick your grapes. Squash them and leave to to ferment for a week. Pour off some of the wine.
Clean out your still by lighting the fire and running vinegar & water solution through the system. Then you gather the leaves of a shrub called carquejo and line the bottom of the still with it – this is to stop the wine/grapes from burning the bottom of the copper pot.
Next, in his 80 litre still, my neighbour first puts in 10 litres of wine, or the first juice from the pressed grapes. Then 60 litres of pomace and then 10 more litres of wine.
Then he sits and watches it until the condensation starts trickling out the spout, at that point it’s important to watch the level of the fire, not to raise it, but not to let the temperature drop so that the distilling is interrupted. During this period many neighbours will drop by for a chinwag, to share a roasted sausage or chestnut and sample a drop of the goodstuff. It will take all weekend to make about 8 litres of aguardente. And then it will take all year to drink it.
The preferred Portuguese way to drink aguardente is to add it to an espresso. In some areas it’s traditional for breakfast, which makes me wonder what they’ll have for lunch. Throughout Portugal it’s a winter warmer, but me myself when I’m at home, I like it on crepes suzette.
Everyone in my village makes their own wine. My house has a 500 litre vat downstairs and most of the ground floor space is dedicated to wine making. Most of the old houses around here have an adegga. In the old world economy, if you don’t drink it, you can barter it for something else you need.
When I first moved in and I still had my wits, I decided that my time would be best spent building rather than winemaking. I gave away some four oak barrels, about 100 bottles and a bunch of other stuff to make some space for my hardware.
Two years on, and somewhat less sane and sensible, I have decided to give this wine caper a go.
At the end of the vindima I picked my own grapes. I have two varieties at my place. One is the very typical ‘morangueiro’ also known as ‘vinho americano’ named after the hybrid imported from North America to combat the Phylloxera plague which decimated European vines in the late 19th century.
The hybrid grape is known as isabella, whose parents are vitis labrusca (whose strong strawberry, morango, scent lends itself to the Portuguese name) and the native European grape vitis vinifera. Unfortunately it looks like isabella might have been the actual carrier of the nymph-fly Phylloxera to Europe from the Americas in the first place, where the native American grapes were immune. Subsequent to the plague, the vinho americano was employed as a disease resistant and hardy variety to be used as a rootstock. In poor and needy early 20th century Portugal, many farmers preferred to cultivate isabella without grafting or restoring the native varieties. In viticulture, not only was it recognised that the grape produced very poor quality wine but the hybrid grapes were considered an aberration on the European wine industry, and a ban was put on the commercialisation of this variety. Hence, you won’t find morangueiro in a bottle. More recently, morangueiro was a suspected cause of white matter lesions in the brain, i.e. brain damage, but the experts now say that it’s falling on your head after drinking morangueiro that’s the culprit. Still, “it would explain a few things” as my brother-in-law put it.
my grapes: tinta on left. morangueiro on right
Farmers today continue to grow isabella /morangueiro/vinho americano, especially in the Azores Islands where all European grapes had died. It’s the predominate backyard grape in this region. It’s prolific and hardy and some people have even become fans of the taste.
My other grape variety they call “tinta”. This could be one of a number of grapes native to Portugal: tinta amarela, tinta barroca, tinta caiada, tinta francisca, tinta miuda, or tinta negra mole. Or it could be that the neighbours don’t know what it is and it’s always just been called ‘red’. Or it could be mean they think it tastes like paint…
OK, less conversation, more action: I picked my grapes, cleaned them from the stem, gave them a wash and put them in two big buckets. I still own a grape masher, but it’s an enormously weighty contraption and I thought it wouldn’t be worth getting it out for only about 80 litres of grapes. Anyway, as foot mashing is traditional somewhere in Portugal I thought I’d give it a whirl. Set up the camera, washed the feet and jumped in.
And immediately fell on my arse, on concrete, causing a bruise as big as a t-bone steak. It’s slippery in a bucket of grapes. DER.
That night, hot feet woke me up, but I didn’t think too much of it. The following night, after another round of foot mashing, my burning, itching feet woke me up again. Not just itchy, I mean itchy bitchy itchy. I had to get up and give them a cold bath and then balm them gently with ointment until they calmed down.
Obviously that put a stop to any more foot-grape shenanigans. As the week continued my feet just got itchier and so shredded up and gory that I looked like I had leprosy.
the moment before falling, expertly captured
I complained to the neighbours. They said of course, idiot tourist, you see us foot mashing? No. DER.
I continued a once-daily mashing of the pomace with, logically, a potato masher. This process is meant to stimulate the fermenting of the grapes, but already I could see that there wasn’t much happening with the ‘tinta’ batch. No bubbles, not much smell. At this point someone more experienced might have added sugar or yeast to get it moving along, but my neighbours use no additives at all, so why would I?
After a week the neighbours told me I had to listen to the wine ingasso (pomace) and if it was quiet, I should drain it off. Indeed, as the wine said nothing, I drained it off, putting one batch in a brand new plastic jerrycan and the other batch into 5L plastic bottles. As I was draining the last of it through a pillowcase, Tia Maria suddenly appeared shaking her head disappointedly. She used some peasant viticulture terms that lay just outside my vocabulary, but I got the gist. It wasn’t looking good.
The method I was using was to follow what the neighbours do, but I was also bearing in mind advice from wine forums where the people are (perhaps) more concerned with the flavour of their labour. I should have done precisely what the neighbours do, but the trouble is, the traditional method is only focussed on saving the crop from souring. I was at crossed purposes, hedging my bets between an amish-like purity and the web-wino’s techno-intelligence.
At this point nothing was going to save this year’s “vintage”. The tinta had never tasted like wine, and was now swinging towards vinegar. The morangueiro at least had some alcoholic quality to it, but I wouldn’t say it was drinkable, exactly.
The one saving grace was that I also made 30 litres of agua pé from the must of the morangueiro. Agua pé is a drink traditionally given to the workers, to children and to the chestnut-eating people on St Martin’s day. It’s water that has been drained through the grape must, with a bucket of sugar added. It is mildly alcoholic, but is basically a nasty cordial… and that’s alright by me.
And there is a final consolation: if your wine turns out complete crap, you can still distill it to make aguardente. Morangueiro makes great aguardente… but for that story you’ll have to read part two…
For people who work from home, a toasted sandwich maker can be your best friend.
Working from home (or working on home, in my case), you are subjected to temptations to stop work almost constantly. Whether it’s the pets or the kids who want your attention, housework, or friends and neighbours who treat you like you’re on holidays, discipline and avoiding excess distraction become paramount.
Lunchtime is a period particularly vulnerable to focus destruction. You have to try and keep lunch easy and quick and this is where the electric sandwich maker comes into its own. It bridges the divide between a hot lunch and cold one, providing a healthy quantity of food that is still a satisfying boredom breaker.
I have several nifty little tricks I do with the sandwich maker, which was always known by its brand name ‘the breville’ when I was growing up, and when it was a just new fad.
The breville stalwart, as everyone knows, is the toasted cheese sandwich. My variation is to grill some onion on one side while toasting the sanga on the other, and stuffing the onions in at the end. Similarly, the pizza sandwich has your preferred selected ingredient grilled straight on one hotplate while you toast the tomato paste, cheese and sliced tomato sandwich on the other half. You can fry up a bit of bacon or garlic, capsicum, salami, or onion to add later, elevating your sandy from an ordinarily simple tosta mista (the Portuguese love a ham and cheese toasty and it is a mandatory item in every café in the land) to something mais especial.
It can also happen that the home worker is so dedicated that meals can be easily forgotten. With the unfortunate development of the webcam the home worker can be sometimes spotted at desk still in jarmies and bed hair at 11am. Again this is where the breville comes into the fray. By midday, the clock might be saying lunch but the stomach is still saying breakfast and the breville is saying French toast.
Far from being second rate, I consider yesterday’s bread a special occasion. Here’s why:
French Toast in the Toasted Sandwich Maker
an egg
splash of milk
maybe a pinch of salt and a pinch of sugar, a squeeze of lemon or orange juice,
or a drop of vanilla essence.
Yesterday’s bread – preferably a sourdough or, if you’re in Portugal, a mistura. Small bread rolls are ideal. White sliced bread tends to fall to pieces once dunked in the batter.
Mix the batter in a cup and pour out onto something that the bread will fit into – a pasta plate is perfect, or a small bowl. Dip the bread briefly so it’s coated all over, but not too soggy.
Wipe some butter around your hot sandwich maker (that’s why you keep the bit of paper or foil that the butter container comes with) and then chuck in the wet bread and drop the lid. Ssssss!
You can eat them with anything you want but the most traditional thing is honey. You could grill a rasher of bacon on one side of the TSM and have a Canadian-style honey/maple syrup-bacon thing, you can go all northern European and have cheeses and deli meats, or be English and have a plop of marmalade. I have been known to have a big dollop of my latest jam with a slosh of cream! Cinnamon and sugar is also good, especially if the toast is still a bit buttery.
If you are Portuguese, you may wish to hum a little Christmas carol as you are scoffing them down (as rabanadas or fatias douradas are a Christmas dessert thing in Portugal, you see. Mmm wonder if my fav cafe will do them).
Some people don’t like these kitchen gadgets because of the idea of cleaning them. But it’s easy. As soon as you’ve taken out your toast, and it the grill is still hot and a bit greasy, get a piece of kitchen paper and give it a wipe over. It’s clean enough in 3 seconds.
Obviously wine-making is far less important in english-speaking cultures – we don’t even start the season with a sexy name!
No sooner had my flesh eating visitors departed than the neighbours had roped me in to help with the grapes. Actually I volunteered in the name of PR and buying protection from the village mafia who have it in for me again because of the dog.
Apparently (and I would like emphasise the speculative flavour of the word apparently) while my guests and I were casually enjoying a top class breakfast, little darling-wookie-dog went and bit one of the sheep. Funny really because I seem to recall him sitting with us and begging for choriço and presunto… and there are 6 other unleashed dogs in the village, with teeth. One of the neighbours and I have decided it was probably little ‘pulga’ (flea), the remaining puppy, who did the job… I’m sure with further DNA testing and forensic processing my precious will be cleared of wrong doing.
Anyway, back to the grapes. It’s not hard work, and there’s no great rush on, but by the end of the day one is knackered nonetheless, and extremely grateful to the flesh-eater who left a quarter bottle of serious scotch whisky behind. I quite enjoy the work, and I think my neighbours do too. Friends and family drop over to pitch in with the work and eat the food, and there’s a bit of a party atmosphere. They make the work a bit of fun – On day one there was singing, the highlight being a 70 yr old husband and wife love duet.
Day two was mostly farting, but there was a dirty joke which had the old girls weeping with laughter. On day three, we’ve had a great deal of discussion about her (that’s me): my unorthodox picking technique which involves ascending the dodgy vine pergola (we were short of ladders), my dog situation and how the 10m long loose leash method is not fooling anyone, and how cool my board shorts are (thanks to australian surfer brother nick). And there was a whole lot more farting, for which my dog got the blame.
Today we achieved a record 1500 kilos of grapes (the other two days we could only manage about 500-750) and now Tia Maria’s vat is full of squashed fermenting grapes, stems and bits of dirt. As I’m trying to learn a bit before I do my own, I’ll pass on the following notes:
The predominant grape here is Morangeira, there’s a bluer grape they call Tinta and there are white grapes they call Branco. (Imaginative names (not) and are probably in village language not real portuguese). They mix everything in together.
They don’t wash the grapes and they don’t even remove the bigger stems, let alone the little ones. Some dividing of the white grapes happened because they are being picked quite late and a lot were either eaten by bees or rotten already.
Although foot mashing is still widely practised in Portugal as a method for making must (I was pretty keen to zip home and put on a skirt until I saw the size and depth of the vat, and realised it was more a wetsuit and snorkel situation) and they do say it lends a certain flavour to the wine, (ahem). Tia Maria has gone slightly modern and is using an electrically-powered crusher that looks like an old-fashioned laundry squeezer.
The musty grapes will ferment for 3 more days (but six days since the first batch went in). They then listen to hear if the fermenting has gone quiet (yes, that’s what they said). If it has then the wine will be drained from the bottom of the tank into stainless steel vats (although she has some oak barrels that she got from me that she might use this year, she says). Then they’ll test it after a month but it’s meant to wait for 3 months…they’ll try not to start drinking it, but then again, there’s a lot to get through, so why wait?
I’ve asked about chemicals, I’ve asked about yeast, I’ve asked about sugar. No to all. It’s just 100% dirty grape juice. (I must say that it tastes a lot like dirty grape juice too, but it’s free and in Portugal wine is just something you drink, not eulogise, so who’s complaining?) ‘Organic’ one of the smarter neighbours said with a wink, because no one has the time, energy or money for spraying.
After the wine has been drained off, the pomace will be used to make aguardente (portuguese grappa) in a process of heating and distilling.
Then the grandchild-who-inherits-everything will be given the nasty task of removing 500 kilos of filthy mush from the 2 metre high tank, (this I would like to see) whereupon it will be dumped in the street and will flow like the rivers of blood in the streets of mafia-ruled Sicily…
I’m a subscriber to John Irving‘s idea that if you’ve had a crap day, cooking dinner is your last opportunity to accomplish something worthwhile, and redeem yourself.
For an overacheiver, it’s inevitable that most days are a disappointment, unless you’ve managed to get Warren Buffet on the phone discussing your plan for relieving world poverty. Even when I’ve suceeded in laying a few stones in a new wall, I usually arrive at dinnertime with more than a just a hunger in my stomach. I have a hunger of the soul as well.
I thought I’d be wacking up a couple of thick stone walls this week, but I need to find two old gorgeous gates before I start them. I’ve been searching for months for the gates and now it’s really holding me up. The delay has given me the time to have three days of migraines, and a whole lot more to complain about. So instead of writing about how the building is going, I’m writing, again, about cooking, and complaining. There it is.
Anyway… dinner. Half the battle for some people is in deciding what to make. It’s not just that you want the result to be delicious and satisfying. Dinner should also should pay lip service (at least) to healthiness AND be new and thrilling, either because you have an audience to please, or just because when things are new, life brightens up a bit.
I’m writing about it because I have just made another great dinner that met the three essential criteria; Yummy, Healthy and New. And I’ve had a mild revelation.
It was basically a pile of blanched green beans with a bunch of small tomatoes, a small tin of emblemic portuguese tuna, olives, a poached egg and a mean lemony herby mayonnaise. The recipe is not the revelation – it’s about where the meal originated from.
Most of it came from my garden. The beans, tomatoes, the herbs, and the olives were mine, the lemon & egg was from my neighbour and the tuna was from… a tin.
Home grown. Food that has come from your own garden almost automatically satifies all the soul food requirements. You’re relieved of the decision of what to make, because you have to make whatever is ready to eat.
Food from you own garden is different from the boring paid for-kind. Garden direct vegies have the power to convert you to food you always hated. Cabbage for example. I never voluntarily ate cabbage until picking it myself. After all, if you’ve gone to the trouble of watering it for months, you do feel obliged to try it at least once. Trying = New. And now I’m addicted.
And fresher is certainly yummier, and healthier. But there’s something of an added cosmic extra about a great meal made with your own gear. It’s an accomplishment of the human animal’s positive interaction with nature. It’s redeeming. It’s soulful.
Growing your own is of course an essential component in the “dump your job and get a life” program. Simplify. Skip the supermarket bullshit. Skip the packaging and the petrol and the spending. Just like a vista of olive trees and the sound of silence, home grown food makes us happier humans.
But because I’m just a city girl in recovery, I want to ride the high higher. I’m going out for dessert. Yay for that other non-farma antidepressant. Cake.
After exhaustive research on the ground and in the hammock I have discovered nearly nothing to explain why Portuguese chicken is the best in the world. But it is. You just have to take my word for it. Portuguese chicken, bought from the supermarket, or the neighbours, or eaten in a restaurant, it is invariably juicy and flavoursome. But why?
I was hoping to discover that Portuguese chooks are not reared in cages or fed hormornes or antibiotics. Alas it would seem that actually nor are australian meat-chickens kept in cages and the hormorne thing is just a myth. The widespread use of antibiotics appears to be under control in the english-speaking-web-friendly world at least, (it’s not discussed in portuguese) if only in the sense that the antibiotics (used to control disease in the animals and linked to the rise of antibiotic resistent infection among humans) in poultry production are limited and controlled by legislation and overseen by industry bodies. There was a specific outbreak of antibiotic contamination in Portugal earlier this year, but it was rapidly stomped upon by conscientious EU-fearing government ministers.
Nor are the local fowl a special and unique breed, as I was anticipating.
When the world-wide-web fails me, I turn to empirical study. Let me say that the Portuguese birds do not look very impressive. Compared with your standard production line woolworths frozen inghams style jobbie they look rather puny. Apparently the average life expectancy for aussie-henny-penny is six weeks. But my favourite lecherous butcher tells me that here, felipe-frango might get as little as three weeks to make his mark on the world. So maybe that’s it. They are the suckling pigs of the chicken industry.
Tia Maria (she’s my neighbour and the fonte of all wisdom) has one word to say on the subject and it is “tempero” (seasoning). I don’t dispute the idea that the Portuguese are world leaders in chicken culinaria, but this theory leaves out the one significant control factor in the research. Me. I am the control. I’ve bought the raw product and cooked chook for myself, my way, in various locales across the globe from Titicaca to Toulouse and my Portuguese bbq chicken is by far the best I’ve ever made.
But: one remaining variable: Piri-Piri. Ingredient unique to Portugal.
So, either my cooking has overtaken my tastebuds’ expectations or Piri-Piri has magical powers. Or Portugal has the best chicken in the world. If you are working on your own theories then I would love to hear them.
My Portuguese BBQ Chicken.
I cook this over hot coals under the gargantuan chimney in my kitchen. I get favouritelecherousbutcher to butterfly the bird or halve it, or maybe quarter, whatever. I wash it, throw some salt at it and give it a few stabs with a small knife especially in the thickest flesh. The quantities of everything are, as usual, completely arbitrary, although for a whole chicken I aim for about a cup of marinade because I like to throw it around.
Lots of garlic
zest and juice of a big lemon
olive oil
piri piri – either a few shakes of the fierce Calvé sauce one, or a lot of dried stuff.
Whip this together and spoon it over the pieces after they’ve had an initial colouring on the grill. I use the “juices run clear” test for doneness, although the Portuguese chook pieces shrink slightly when they are done. Anyway I’m usually too hungry to wait for more than 45 minutes and too paranoid to cook it for less. Whatever, it’s fantastic every time.
Saudades for Yen’s. (Vietnamese-Portuguese Chicken Salad).
In Sydney, I lived above a vietnamese restaurant called Yen’s. The food was so good, inexpensive and fresh that I’d eat there about four times a week. Many friends became addicted to it too, to the point where Yen’s became not just a place to eat, but a part of my life. I named my cat Mao, for example, because it’s Vietnamese for cat (way before I knew it sounds like bad in Portuguese).
The problem is that in central portugal it is impossible to get the right ingredients. So this is a recipe of careful substitution, and I think it’s a success because eating this helps to calm the beast when I get savage cravings, or saudades, for Yen’s.
Cooked chicken leftovers, ripped into shreds
a pile of shredded cabbage – Couve Lombarda in Portugal
a small finely sliced onion
two handfuls mint
small handful of toasted peanuts
vermicelli rice noodles, if you can find them, soaked in boiling water
Nuoc Cham (a vietnamese sauce, based on fish sauce and chilli)
Shake the ingredients in a jar and adjust according to your taste. Pour it over the salad just before eating.
equal quantities brown/yellow sugar (dissolved in equal parts hot water), fish sauce, white/rice wine vinegar.
2 small seeded chillies and 2 cloves garlic, juice of half a lime/lemon
dash of vegetable oil.
If you can’t get the fish sauce, I have used a mix of one part white or apple vinegar, 1 part oyster sauce, a dash of soy and a dash of water.
‘For the love of wild blackberries’ does not have the same ring to it, does it? I’m not even sure that they are blackberries, as the dictionary calls them mulberries but they are nothing like the mulberry tree that I used used to climb and pick the fruit of when I was a kid in Sydney.
So please advise, horticulturists, what are these called in English?
This is the time of year in my village when this plant, all year round a painful and invasive nuisance, finally pays back. It’s luscious and intense fruit makes fantastic jam, and I love jam. The amoras season also marks the start of several months of picking, being followed by the grapes, then the olives, oranges and then finally in November it will rain figs. When the figs stop, the rain will start, and it wont stop raining until may.
I really like making jam, but I only recently discovered that other people like my jam too. It makes me especially happy when my jars of stuff are enjoyed by portuguese friends. Normally my giveaways are just too weird for them, but jam seems to fit in with a normal portuguese jam-freshcheese-biscuits afternoon snack or dessert. And I’m only too happy to find a new way to eat jam.
Amoras Jam
For 1 jar of jam, I use approximately;
1 jar fruit
1/2 jar white sugar
juice of half lemon
1/3 jar rosé wine
I like my jams a bit runny, full of chunky fruit and not too sweet. The wine gives the jam a bit more complexity and depth.
I boil it up ferociously until a mass of bubbles have collected high above the surface of the fruit – it looks like boiling toffee. It usually takes about half an hour and I could let it go for an hour, but no more. I don’t bother to skim or even test for setting, but I do wash and boil the jars, dry them, fill them warm and then boil them again.
Apart from having jam on toast (especially good on portuguese breads), I also eat it with plain yoghurt for dessert, pile it on ice cream and serve it with fresh cheese, portuguese style. It would also be unforgettable with pannacotta (similar to leite creme in portugal) or on a cheesecake. Or a pavlova! Oh meu amor!
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