Chocolate mousse - eggs, sugar, chocolate (butter optional) - is Portugal’s first-port-of-call comfort food. And no, I don’t know why - unless that Portugal is a hard land - mountains on one side, Atlantic on the other, swift rivers in between - and chocolate is what people reach for when nothing else will do. Which may be why you’ll find chocolate mousse on sale, home-made or commercially-prepared, in every glass-fronted cold-cabinet in every restaurant and trucker’s pull-in throughout the land.
The affluent citizenry of Lisbon (Brussels has served Portugal's business-folk well) take their midday meal in elegant minimalist restaurants in the Barrio Alto such as Pap'Açorda – all blond wood, black leather and waiting staff to match – that serves updated traditional cooking in decidedly un-minimalist portions.
The most popular dish with the lunchtime clientele of politicians and media-folk in Pap’Açorda when I visited the restaurant in 2003 (no longer in its original home - for the low-down see reply-thread) was a seafood açorda that included shreds of salt-cod as well as the huge, juicy scarlet prawns known around the Iberian peninsula as carabinieros - red-faced policemen.
A starter of frittered soft-shell crabs came with a side-dish of steamed grelos, turnip tops, dressed with olive oil and seasalt, and chunks of crisp-crusted broa, cornmeal bread. To finish (as I remember, provided unasked for free), a dollop of sludgy chocolate mousse served from a huge ice-frosted steel bowl and proferred to each customer on the end of a large wooden spoon as a sophisticated scoop-your-own, seconds encouraged (so chic!).
The restaurant’s most popular main dish, açorda de bacalhau, is, quite simply, an expression of Portugal’s national identity - the ingredients, bread and salt-cured cod, sustained Magellan’s sailors on the first circumnavigation of the globe.
Although all bread-baking nations invent recipes to make stale bread palatable, nowhere else is the basic material used with such ingenuity. Nor are such preparations, each with its own variations and flavourings, confined to the kitchens of those who can afford nothing grander. That said, it's complicated. The difference between, say, sopa seca, migas, gaspacho and açorda are as much in the heart as in the head. Only an insider can venture an opinion on which is which, and even insiders disagree on the details.
All that can be said with confidence is that the quality of the bread dictates the excellence of the dish. And that what's needed is good country bread of the kind that's sold by weight from the baker, dense-crumbed, baked in a wood-fired oven, none of that fancy San Fran sourdough (who'd buy bread that's mostly made of holes?). It's also acknowledged that the basic preparation can be served plain with no other dressing but a little olive oil and few scraps of garlic and that it can also be elevated as a vehicle for small amounts of something delicious. Lobster, partridge and truffles are not unknown.
Of the various stale-bread possibilities, Portugal's açorda is prepared in much the same way as Spain's paella, Persia's pilaff and Italy's risotto - that is, including a preliminary frying of flavouring ingredients, but with breadcrumbs taking the place of rice. Migas, generally speaking, are pre-soaked breadcrumbs which are then heated with olive oil in a pan, sometimes to the point of crisping and browning, sometimes simply made into a soft pan-dumpling. Portugal’s gaspacho, on the other hand, can be expected to be a bread-soup made by softening torn-up bread with hot or cold water or broth. The alternative, sopa seca, dry soup, is usually, though not always, a simple bread-porridge with or without additional flavouring.
Confused? Me too. For further and better particulars, consult Maria Lourdes Modesto's Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa (first published 1981, English translation, 2002). Maria Lourdes, a tv chef in the 1970’s, appealed to her viewers for traditional recipes after the demise of Portugal's dictator, Antonio Salazar, a time when all Portugal was fearful of change. Of the several thousand recipes that came flooding in, roughly two thousand were treasured family recipes for açorda (as I remember, she included about a dozen in the book).
Now you know it all. Almost. Paid subscribers (hooray!) will shortly be in receipt of a recipe for an elegant seafood açorda as served in all the best eateries in uptown Lisboa.
P.S. More recipes and stories in my very own The Food of Spain & Portugal (2nd hand only, rather expensive - that’s the way the cookie crumbles).
Thanks so much for the marvellously useful update, Gastroillogica! I'll add a note to the post and recommend your info. Very grateful.
I got a horrible head cold en route to Lisbon and ate some kind of shellfish and bread stew there that was the perfect dish in the circumstances. A sort of Mediterranean nursery food, it felt like.