49 Fun Facts About Portuguese Food

On the night of June 12, Lisbon honours Saint Anthony with street parties and grilled what?

Sardines, grilled on street corners and eaten on a slice of bread. The party honours Lisbon-born Saint Anthony, although the city's official patron saint is actually Saint Vincent.

The Portuguese boast a different salt cod recipe for every what?

Day of the year: the boast is 365 ways to cook it, all for a catch that has never swum in Portuguese waters. Some cookbooks push the claim past a thousand.

What does 'fiel amigo', Portugal's affectionate nickname for salt cod, mean?

Faithful friend: salt cod was cheap, kept for months and reached every corner of the country, so ordinary families could always count on it for protein.

Boiled with potatoes and cabbage, bacalhau is Portugal's traditional supper on which night?

Christmas Eve: the family supper, the consoada, is plain boiled salt cod drenched in olive oil. The leftovers come back at lunch on Christmas Day as roupa velha, 'old clothes'.

Which two countries supply most of the cod behind Portugal's bacalhau?

Iceland and Norway: Norway alone supplies well over half of the cod Portugal eats, so the national dish is made almost entirely from imported cod.

Portugal eats more of what per head than any other EU country?

Fish: about 53 kg a head in 2023, more than double the EU average of 22.89 kg. Portugal held that lead even as Europe's overall appetite for seafood fell to a ten-year low.

What is caldo verde?

A potato and collard-green soup from the Minho: the greens are shredded very finely and barely boiled, and each bowl usually gets a slice or two of chouriço.

Order a bica at a Lisbon café counter and what arrives?

An espresso, small and strong: bica is also the Portuguese word for a spout. In the north the same cup is a cimbalino, named after the La Cimbali espresso machines.

Which Indian curry began as Portugal's carne de vinha d'alhos, pork in wine and garlic?

Vindaloo comes from vinha d'alhos, the wine-and-garlic pork marinade the Portuguese carried to Goa. The 'aloo' is alho, garlic, and has nothing to do with potatoes.

What measure separates extra virgin from lesser grades of Portuguese olive oil?

Acidity in degrees: extra virgin oil may hold no more than 0.8 percent free acid and virgin 2 percent. The worst grade, lampante, is named after lamp fuel and can't be eaten unrefined.

How is the stew cozido cooked at Furnas in the Azores?

In volcanic soil: pots of beef, pork, sausages and vegetables are lowered into holes in the steaming ground at Furnas and dug out hours later, cooked by the earth's heat alone.

What is caldeirada?

Turbot, monkfish, hake and mussels go in with potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, often in a clay pot.

People from which Portuguese city are nicknamed tripeiros, or tripe eaters?

Porto: by legend the city gave all its meat to the fleet that sailed to conquer Ceuta in 1415 and kept only the offal. Tripe with white beans is still the local signature.

What does francesinha, Porto's famous sandwich, literally mean?

Little French girl: the word is the feminine diminutive of francês. The story goes that the spicy sandwich was named after French women, thought bolder than the Portuguese of the 1950s.

The francesinha began in Porto as a take on which French café classic?

Croque monsieur: a cook back from France and Belgium rebuilt the toastie at A Regaleira with steak, sausage and a hot sauce, turning a light snack into a knife-and-fork meal.

The hot sauce poured over a francesinha is built on tomato and which drink?

Beer: it and tomato are the two constants of the sauce, along with a chilli kick. Beyond that every house makes it its own way and guards the recipe.

Pica-pau, a Portuguese bar snack of fried meat morsels speared with toothpicks, shares its name with which bird?

Woodpecker: diners supposedly peck at the small pieces of garlicky fried pork or beef and pickles with a toothpick, the way the bird jabs at a tree.

Leitão, Bairrada's pride, is named for leite, milk; what is it?

Roast suckling pig: a leitão is a piglet not yet weaned, hence the milk in its name. The Bairrada roasts them whole, while nearby towns fight over chanfana, goat stewed in red wine.

Which two ingredients are combined in carne de porco à alentejana?

Pork and clams: cubes of marinated pork are fried golden, then the clams go in to open in the juices. One story credits cooks on the coast, who named it for the Alentejo's outdoor-reared pigs, tastier than their own fish-fed ones.

Bitoque, an everyday lunch plate in Portuguese cafés, is a small steak with chips, crowned with what?

A fried egg: the Portuguese call an egg-topped steak 'a cavalo', on horseback, because the egg looks as if it is riding the meat. Rice and salad usually share the plate.

What is a bifana?

A pork steak in a roll: thin slices simmered with garlic and wine. The name comes from bife, a word the Portuguese borrowed from the English beef, though there is none in it.

Ginjinha, the sweet liqueur Lisbon drinks by the shot, is made by steeping which fruit in brandy?

Sour cherries: they steep in aguardente with sugar and cinnamon. At Lisbon's tiny ginjinha bars the one question is 'com ou sem elas?', with or without the cherries in your glass.

The cataplana, a clam-shaped copper pan for steaming seafood, is the pride of which region?

Algarve: the two halves clamp shut and seal, so the pan works as a crude pressure cooker and the clams, prawns and pork inside steam in their own juices.

Portugal's secret Jews invented the alheira sausage to look as if they were eating what?

Pork: a house with no sausages hanging in the smokehouse invited the Inquisition's attention, so the story goes that converts stuffed theirs with poultry, game and bread instead.

Which Portuguese smoked sausage is stuffed mainly with wheat flour?

Farinheira, from farinha, flour: it looks like a meat sausage, but the filling is wheat flour, pork fat, paprika and white wine, so it eats soft and doughy.

Presunto de Barrancos, the prized ham of the Alentejo, comes from free-roaming black pigs fattened on what?

Acorns: the pigs forage for them under the oaks, and the breed is unusually good at storing that rich diet as fat inside the muscle, which is what marbles the cured ham.

What is Queijo da Serra, Portugal's mountain cheese, made from?

Sheep's milk and thistle rennet: dried cardoon flowers curdle the raw milk instead of animal rennet. A ripe one is so soft that you cut a lid in the rind and spoon it out.

Vinho verde may be red or white; why is it called 'green'?

It should be drunk young: verde means green as in unripe, the opposite of maduro, and the wines go on sale within months of the harvest. The region's wine board also credits its lush green landscape.

Why were Vinho Verde vines once trained up trees?

To free the ground: on tiny family plots the soil was wanted for food crops, so the vines were sent climbing up trees and poles and had to be picked from tall ladders.

What gives port wine its sweetness and strength?

Fermentation halted with grape spirit: the brandy goes in while the wine is still fermenting, so much of the grapes' natural sugar is never used up and the strength climbs to 19 to 22 percent.

In the granite troughs called lagares, how are grapes for traditional port still crushed?

Trodden by foot: teams still tread the grapes in wide stone tanks at some estates, though many houses now use machines, some of them robotic treaders.

Along which river are the port vineyards planted?

Douro: until the 1960s flat-bottomed barcos rabelos ran the casks down its rapids to the cellars of Vila Nova de Gaia. Then dams tamed the river and lorries took over the job.

What are the two primary categories of red port?

Ruby and Tawny: ruby is bottled young and stays deep red, while tawny spends years in wooden casks, where contact with air fades it to amber and turns it nutty.

A cargo of which wine triggered the seizure of John Hancock's sloop Liberty in 1768?

Madeira: customs men claimed Hancock had landed wine without paying duty, and Boston rioted when they took the ship. Eight years later the Declaration of Independence was toasted with it.

Medronho, southern Portugal's firewater, is distilled from the berries of which tree?

Strawberry tree: no relation to the strawberry, it is an evergreen of the heather family whose red berries grow wild. Farmers long picked them by hand and distilled them at home.

Monks of which Lisbon institution created the original pastéis de Belém?

Jerónimos Monastery: the usual story is that convents used egg whites to starch habits and clear wine, leaving mountains of yolks for custards and sweets.

Which upheaval shut Portugal's monasteries and pushed Belém's monks into selling custard tarts?

The Liberal Revolution of 1820 set off the reforms that shut every monastery in Portugal in 1834. Facing eviction, someone from the monastery began selling the tarts through a nearby shop to survive.

The Pastéis de Belém shop began in buildings attached to what?

Sugar refinery: someone from the shut monastery first sold the tarts through its shop, and baking began next door in 1837. The recipe is still known to only a few and kept behind the door of a 'secret room'.

Roughly how many custard tarts does the Pastéis de Belém shop sell each day?

About 20,000 on an ordinary day, and more in peak season. Every one comes from this single shop, because the original recipe is baked and sold nowhere else.

Which fast-food chain bought the recipe for Macau's Portuguese egg tart and sells it across China?

KFC: the Macau tart was the work of an English pharmacist, Andrew Stow, who opened Lord Stow's Bakery in 1989. KFC bought its recipe from his former wife and rival baker, Margaret Wong.

What are fios de ovos, a golden Portuguese sweet eaten alone or piled on cakes?

Candied egg threads: yolks are trickled into boiling sugar syrup and lifted out as golden strands. The Portuguese carried the trick to Thailand, where the sweet is still made as foi thong.

Peixinhos da horta, Portugal's battered green beans, reached Japan in the 1500s and inspired which dish?

Tempura: the beans' name means 'little fish from the garden'. Portuguese sailors first landed in Japan in 1543; the shogun banished their countrymen in 1639, but the battered frying stayed.

Portuguese plantation workers turned malasada doughnuts into an everyday treat in which US state?

Hawaii: labourers from Portugal's Atlantic islands came to work the sugar plantations from the 1870s and brought their Shrove Tuesday doughnuts. Fat Tuesday in Hawaii is now Malasada Day.

The word marmalade comes from marmelada, a firm Portuguese paste made from which fruit?

Quince, marmelo in Portuguese: the firm, sliceable paste was known in England by the 1530s, and only in the 17th century did the word stretch to cover citrus preserves.

Portuguese ships first carried piri-piri's ancestors to Africa from where?

The Americas: like every chilli, piri-piri descends from New World plants. Portuguese traders carried them to Africa, where they ran wild, and then on to Goa and the rest of Asia.

Piri-piri echoes 'pilipili', which simply means pepper in which African language?

Swahili: pilipili is its everyday word for pepper. The word is probably an import itself, from Persian pilpil and, further back, the Sanskrit name for long pepper.

Which restaurant chain made piri-piri sauce famous in the United Kingdom?

Nando's: in 1987 two friends lunched on peri-peri chicken at Chickenland, a humble Portuguese takeaway in Rosettenville, Johannesburg. They liked it so much that they bought the place and built a chain on it.

Which autumn harvest was Portugal's staple starch before the potato arrived?

Chestnuts: dried and ground into flour, they were a staple starch until the potato took over. They are still roasted on St Martin's Day, 11 November, and washed down with the new wine.

In Greek, Turkish and Arabic, which fruit is named after Portugal?

Orange: Greek portokali, Turkish portakal and Arabic burtuqal all echo Portugal, whose traders made the sweet orange common around the Mediterranean. Before that, Europe's oranges were bitter.