Lisbon, Part 1

 So, I recently spent a week or so in Lisbon.

I should open by noting I don’t speak a word of viable Portuguese. My Spanish has a fair bit of utilitarian vocabulary due to my many years in kitchens, and my French is at least sufficient for bakeries and pastry shops, but I admit to a great deal of trouble with the native tongue. The fluidity of it coupled with the Ss and elongated Js made it parse like mingled Russian and Spanish in my head- thus utterly incomprehensible to someone unfamiliar with the phraseology and diction. I found it much easier to work in English or Spanish- both quite commonly used. Got a little lucky there.

The flight safety video for air Portugal clued me in on that before my arrival, and also gave me a perfect followup at about the 1:40 mark. “In Portugal it’s not always easy to keep your belt fastened- the food is just too good!” Weeeeeell... airplane seat belt safety aside, let's just say I’ve crossed off a lot of possible places where people might have gotten that notion about the food. 

One of their best-known signature dishes / traditional specialties, the croqueta bacalhau, is a stellar example of things that, to my mind, might be better off left to history rather than remain a component of the everyday, even for the tourists.
For those not familiar, it's an offshoot of a once-necessary method for preservation- You take a fish (in this case cod, which is essentially all bacalhau refers to in Portugal) and unleash a combination of drying and salting on it. It's an extremely aggressive method, to the point that to render the fish edible again after the process is complete, it must be soaked for multiple days in multiple changes of water to leech out the salt and rehydrate it. While the technique itself is supposedly Basque, it has the feel of a method you'd see in Scandinavia, land of vaguely terrifying preservation methods.

Once you have your mummified-and-then-reconstituted fish, you then flake it like pork sung, mix it with a bit of binder, wrap it around something, and fry it till it's crispy. The filling that got the most play in the many places offering them as I passed by was a type of cheese (which I'm reasonably sure was Serra de Estrela), and as someone who loves Scotch Eggs, it tempted me enough to try. The result was basically the worst variation on a mozzarella stick that I've ever even conceptualized, let alone tasted. Not going for those again, thanks.

The most unexpectedly delicious piece of seafood I ate was simple deep-fried cuttlefish(?). But it was the underlying preparation that truly let it shine. Uncertain exactly what that was, but I suspect vigorous marination, perhaps even a quick-pickle, and pressure cooked to tenderness long ahead of time before being ordered, battered, and fried. The vigorous, salty twang struck more of a chord than almost anything that day or a few around it. Most else I ate seemed to suffer from serious flavor anemia by comparison.

The Itis: The Sandwich

Another dish where I noticed that more was in the Francesinha, a modernish, localized variant on the French classic Croque-Monsieur. On paper, this thing is a dream. Dude food, hangover food, drunk food, it ticks every box for me. It's an afternoon nap on a high-sided plate.

Many sorts of meat- marinated grilled or seared beef (of uncertain cut but with the loose grain of skirt or flank), along with linguiça, coppa or chorizo, and some sort of deli ham, all tucked in a sandwich, crisped like a grilled cheese, topped with lots of cheese and broiled, then drowned in a rich and spicy sauce of what was probably onion, garlic, madeira, tomato, and beer. And a fried egg on top, because sure, why not, we'll go full Croque-Madame with it.

I could eat one of those every day. I might die of it, but I also wouldn't really mind. So rarely have I the freedom to pursue the privilege of pleasure I qualify for, it might well serve as a common earned indulgence.

Alongside, one cannot talk food there without talking wine. Whoof. It’s everywhere, it's all sorts of affordable, and, by and large, it's very much not to my tastes. I didn’t pay more than a fiver for a bottle of wine all week… and given how they tasted I certainly wouldn’t have. I am not a regular wine drinker, even if I am conversant in how to, but the general willingness to kick back with a bottle of quaffable vinho over lunch had me a little impressed. Despite deflecting proffered pours as readily and often as able, I still drank more wine that week than in probably the previous five years.

At a very enthusiastic and informative wine tasting in a Lisbon museum, I found that it’s not uncommon to ignore the norm about blending grape varietals. In brief: The requirement to label a bottle as say, ‘Merlot’ requires a guaranteed minimum percentage of that grape to be used. While the required number varies from place to place, 75% is the minimum here in California, so I'm sure the EU has stricter standards for it.

The interesting approach I was talked through forsakes that opportunity to blend, and so I thought it worth a mention. Using blending grapes is more or less standard viticultural practice- it aids in more consistent, readily replicable product from year to year, but it does so at a potential cost. Using 100% of a given grape varietal ensures the distinct characteristics of it are in no way altered, muddled or smoothed out. I say it thus because some of those characteristics are potentially quite objectionable to the untrained palate, far more so than I might have considered to ensure them marketable.

Eating and drinking in Portugal is not for the faint of heart or flimsy of constitution.
More to come soon!