FOOD LOVE AFFAIR
dish with layers of deep chocolate pudding and foam paired with a glass of red port.An hour south of Porto, I visited the Amorim cork factory. Carlos de Jesus described the industry’s rise through the centuries until World War II, seeming to adapt to every new modern need. Cork fell out of favour in the 1950s. In the past 15 years, it has become modern again.
A few days later, we woke in Evora in the central Alentejo region. Our Airbnb was a centuries-old stucco home in one of those alleys and steps from the main square, where we stopped for a coffee and admired the Roman temple’s ruin and its mighty columns. The Roman Empire passed through here on the way to the sea.
In Evora, my hunt for cork’s history took me through a rolling landscape of olive and cork oak groves, where trees had been shorn in the recent harvest. Here, cork reigns over a native dry savanna, or montado. The harvest happens in summer, so the shorn trunks we passed had already started to weather and darken. The cork tree is unique in its ability to survive and even thrive after losing its bark. You can harvest cork from the same tree, every eight to 10 years, for many decades. Lately, the forests have suffered neglect as landowners moved to cities. For generations, Alentejo was Portugal’s breadbasket. That bounty is on the table at Taberna Tipica Quarta Feira, a few blocks from where we stayed in Evora. The owner’s son, another João, welcomed us. The taberna serves a set menu. For starters: locally foraged mushrooms sauteed in olive oil, melted sheep’s cheese with herbs; scrambled eggs with asparagus and cheese in a terrine; and a delicious cured meat similar to prosciutto.
Then João presented a platter commemorating the taberna’s 27th year in business, featuring the first dish his father served, decades ago: black pork with cumin, mint and orange, garnished with orange wedges. Then came cachaço de porco, a hearty plate of pork neck braised for three hours with potatoes along with spinach and bread migas.
We washed this down with an excellent red wine from a local vintner. Dessert was an arrangement of fresh cherries, walnut cake and what João called “cheesecake”: a dense egg-yolk custard. A quince poached in candied wine sauce, served with thimble glasses of a liqueur, capped it off. The next morning, at the sleepy Evora station, we rumbled through the rolling landscape among oaks resembling gigantic olive trees. Cows and sheep grazed. Fog seeped through the open woods. The fog lifted as we reached the wide Tagus close to Lisbon, vast and blue as the San Francisco Bay, and the bridge we were on glowed burnt orange like the Golden Gate. Soon the pastel city appeared far below us.
That afternoon, in a visit to the University of Lisbon, I learned more about Portugal’s montado ecosystem and its history. A forestry professor showed me the library, a convent beautifully restored. She said that other countries seem to think the Portuguese were sad, but they’re actually lively and fun. I said maybe the popularity of Portuguese fado music with its blues-like sound of saudade, or wistfulness, was to blame. She laughed.
I didn’t expect good food at the Fado Museum, just good music – but the dinner was delicious, starting with tapenade and octopus salad. Then, bacalao a ze do pipo, a baked fish dish. When the performers came out, two guitarists wove their harmonies together, one higher like a mandolin. A young singer stood draped in a red cape. She had a resonant, deep voice.
The Douro red wine that the Brazilian waiter suggested was startlingly good. And the orange cake was light and paired with muscatel. During World War II, Lisbon was notoriously riddled with spies, even more like the movie, Casablanca, than Casablanca itself was. I signed up for a walking tour of its spy history, and met the guide, a balding man in an overcoat, under the arch in the main Praca do Comercio. Jose grew up in the later years of Salazar. He said that when he was in school, students shared rumours about which students and teachers were government moles.
In the 1940s, amid Europe’s migration crisis, hundreds of thousands of refugees passed through Lisbon while fleeing Hitler’s brutality. Walking through Rossio Square, Jose explained how the refugees brought new influences but couldn’t stay. For our Culinary Backstreets tour, we met João in a market that had been rundown for years before being restored by the Time Out media company.
Now, it boasted new eateries on one side and traditional vendors on the other, selling gorgeous vegetables and fruits: rows of grapes, pears, clementines and apples. The glistening sea produce included chrome-like silver scabbardfish, roe, grouper, monkfish, clams and tuna from the Azores.
Gleaming reds, blues and iridescent whites on ice. The fishmongers arrive at the docks in the wee hours for the day’s catch and hit the market by 5am.
After our mid-morning start with vinho verde, João fed us snacks of quince preserves along with shaved black pork and a bit of sheep’s cheese. Outside, we stopped for a shot of sour cherry liqueur from a chocolate cup. By the end, we had spent five hours with João, who shared his reading tastes, opinions on futebol, his mother’s insights on buying “electro-domestic” appliances, and his favourite recipes