Eat Alentejo

The soul of the nation’s cuisine, the largest Portuguese region of Alentejo offers fresh dishes and rich history, all under a cloudless sky.

- Audrey Gillan

 

Dense chewy bread with a crust you can knock your knuckles on; black Iberico pork that’s sweet, nutty and moist; tomatoes so vibrant they could carry a meal on their own; verdant, fruity extra virgin olive oil; and glorious wines. Set these kitchen pantry mainstays against vast cloudless blue skies that crown land strewn with wheat fields, olive groves and quirky, scarecrow-shaped cork trees, and you begin to get a tiny taste of Alentejo, the largest yet least-populated region in Portugal.

Meaning ‘land beyond the Tagus’ (the river that runs alongside Lisbon), Alentejo was historically home to bullfights and Lusitano horses. People lived according to the weather, working the wine or olive harvest in late summer and early winter, and living from what they could wrangle from a little plot of land, raising a pig and growing vegetables, for the rest of the year. It’s a place that bakes brown in the 40-degree heat of summer, where houses are white and windows and doors are outlined in iridescent blue, and where you can drive for miles without seeing a soul.

The landscape is the essence of life in Alentejo, and it’s also the larder — so cooking is simple and rustic. Many of the dishes here form the backbone of all Portuguese cookery: over the centuries, poverty-stricken farming folk fanned out across the country in search of work, taking their recipes with them. Here, the necessity of eking things out came to define popular dishes. Stale bread is fried with a little pig fat and perhaps some wild asparagus to create migas, which simply means ‘crumbs’ and is a tasty, crispy breadcrumb kind-of hash. Alternately, the old bread is used to thicken soup known as açorda. This is built on a broth base, sometimes with a small amount of shellfish or a poached egg, and is always scattered with lots of chopped coriander.