A Taste of Portugal

I’m writing this while sitting on a bus somewhere in southern Portugal, about an hour from crossing into Spain.

Behind us is a wonderful month in Portugal. Ahead of us is Málaga, where Carla and I will be spending the next month.

And somewhere between the two countries, as I was thinking about Spain and wondering what might be waiting for us there, it occurred to me that I had somehow neglected to write about one of the more important parts of our Portuguese experience.

The food. A serious oversight. So before we cross the border and begin eating our way through Andalusia, Portugal deserves its moment at the table. And it was a very good table.

We ate exceptionally well during our month here. The food generally felt fresh, uncomplicated, and wonderfully connected to where we were. Along the coast, seafood is everywhere - cod, tuna, sardines, squid, octopus, and whatever else happened to come out of the Atlantic that morning.

Portugal has a particularly serious relationship with cod. You begin to suspect there may be more ways to prepare bacalhau than there are people in the country.

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Octopus was another favorite. If you haven’t tried it, I’d recommend suspending whatever reservations you may have about eating something intelligent enough to solve puzzles and opening your mind a bit. Prepared properly, it can be absolutely delicious.

Sardines are another matter. Portuguese people adore them, particularly during the summer when grills seem to appear everywhere. I respect this enormously.

I’m simply not entirely sure I share the enthusiasm.

Sardines taste unmistakably like fish. There is no identity crisis happening on the plate. If you enjoy anchovies and other strongly flavored fish, you’ll probably be very happy.

If not, Portugal has plenty of other things to feed you. And Lagos certainly did. We ate some of the best meals of our travels there, partly because the town itself is so international. Alongside traditional Portuguese restaurants were wonderful Indian, Italian, Spanish, and other cuisines reflecting the people who have made Lagos home.

There are places we’ve visited where the scenery alone gives us a reason to return.

With Lagos, I wouldn’t rule out going back simply because we were hungry.

But Lisbon brought something different to the food story. It brought monks and prostitutes.

Stay with me.

Carla has a better name for this particular chapter of Portuguese culinary history.

Tarts and Vicars. Which is difficult to improve upon.

One half of the story takes us to Belém, just outside central Lisbon, and the magnificent Jerónimos Monastery. This is where one of Portugal’s greatest gifts to humanity entered the picture:

Pastéis de nata.

Those small Portuguese custard tarts with crisp, flaky pastry surrounding a rich egg custard deserve considerably more attention than their size would suggest.

As the traditional story goes, monasteries and convents in Portugal once used large quantities of egg whites for starching religious garments and other purposes, leaving an abundance of yolks behind. Portuguese ingenuity apparently looked at all those yolks and concluded that throwing them away would be both wasteful and spiritually irresponsible.

So they added sugar. Excellent decision.

From that came a tradition of extraordinary egg-yolk pastries, including the custard tart that became synonymous with Portugal.

After the monastery closed in the nineteenth century, the recipe associated with Belém eventually found its way to the bakery now known as Pastéis de Belém, where the original version is still made according to a closely guarded recipe.

Naturally, we felt obliged to investigate. Thoroughly.

These are small pastries, which creates the dangerous illusion that eating several is somehow different from eating one large dessert. I’m comfortable maintaining that illusion.

Fresh from the oven, with the pastry still crisp and the custard warm, they are ridiculous. A little cinnamon. Perhaps some powdered sugar. Two bites. Gone. Another one suddenly seems like the responsible thing to do.

Portugal has bakeries everywhere, and you’ll find versions of pastel de nata throughout the country, but eating one in Belém, close to where the tradition began, adds something to the experience.

Food becomes history you can eat.

And then, on the other side of Lisbon’s personality, we have Pink Street. Today, Rua Nova do Carvalho is one of Lisbon’s better-known nightlife areas, filled with restaurants, bars, music, and people taking photographs of the bright pink pavement beneath their feet.

It wasn’t always quite so Instagram-ready. The neighborhood surrounding Cais do Sodré was once Lisbon’s rough-and-tumble waterfront district. Sailors arrived from around the world, and with them came bars, gambling, prostitution, and the various enterprises that have historically followed sailors around port cities.

It had a reputation.

Then Lisbon began reinventing the area. The street was painted pink, old establishments were transformed, new restaurants and bars moved in, and what had once been one of Lisbon’s seedier neighborhoods became one of its trendiest.

There’s something about that transformation that feels very Lisbon to me.

A monastery helps give birth to one of the country’s most beloved pastries.

A former red-light district becomes one of the city’s fashionable dining and nightlife neighborhoods.

Tarts and vicars. Debauchery and the divine. Apparently Lisbon has room for everyone. And perhaps that’s what I enjoy most about the city - not just with food, but with Lisbon itself. It doesn’t seem overly interested in separating things into neat categories. Old and new coexist. Beautiful and gritty occupy the same street. Tradition sits beside experimentation.

Portuguese culture remains unmistakably present while people from all over the world continue arriving and adding something of their own. The food reflects that.

And I think food often tells us more about a place than we realize.

Recipes carry migration. Spices carry history. Ingredients tell us what grows nearby and what arrived on ships centuries ago. A pastry can contain the story of a monastery. A restaurant can tell the story of a neighborhood changing. A plate of grilled fish can tell you that generations of people have depended upon the sea outside the window.

We sometimes think of eating while traveling as something that happens between the important parts of the day. I’ve increasingly come to think it is one of the important parts.

Sitting at a table gives you another way into a culture. You learn what people linger over. What they share. What they celebrate. What their grandmother insisted was the only correct way to prepare something. And, inevitably, which restaurant makes the best version of a dish - an issue about which there will apparently never be universal agreement anywhere on Earth.

Food creates conversation. It slows us down. It introduces us to people. And occasionally it leaves us sitting silently for a moment because whatever we just put into our mouth is so good that conversation seems temporarily unnecessary.

Portugal gave us quite a few of those moments.

And now our bus is moving toward Spain. The Portuguese landscape is gradually slipping behind us, another country is waiting ahead, and after a month here, we leave with plenty of memories. The cliffs of Lagos. The streets of Lisbon. The people. The light. The ocean.

And yes, quite a lot of food. Especially those custard tarts.

Soon enough, we’ll be in Málaga. A new country. New streets. New people. New stories.

And judging by what I know about Spain, I suspect we’ll continue approaching travel the way we usually do - with our eyes wide open, our curiosity fully engaged, and our mouths prepared for whatever comes next.

It’s a demanding job. But somebody has to do it.