Food Features: Portuguese Bacalhau

It has been (amazingly) nearly two years since my trip to Portugal, which, as you may know, was my first ever destination in Europe, and I still remember very vividly my first ever Portuguese culinary adventure.

Over the one week I spent in the country, I had the luxury of sampling many local delicacies, including, but not limited to, Portuguese cod and other types of fish, octopus, pork chops, Portuguese chicken, the famous Pastel de Nata and, of course, Port wine.

Today, I'd like to shed some more light on the dish known as bacalhau (cod), which is one of the most famous dishes in the country.

In Portugal it is said that there are 365 ways to cook bacalhau, one for every day of the year. In reality, there are probably many more ways to cook the fish, but one thing is for sure: in Portugal, you're bound to find the fish very very fresh.

According to some of my research, the dish dates back over 500 years, as it became a staple of Portuguese cuisine in the times prior to refrigeration seeing as there was no actual need to preserve it in the cold. It turns out that drying and salting the cod was enough to preserve its nutrients and extract even more flavours from it in order to make it tastier. Additionally, seeing as cod is low in oils, it keeps better, seeing as more oily fish don't preserve as well.

The dish's rise in popularity actually has some strong Canadian influence. Its popularity in Portugal was, in part, due to Newfoundland, in Canada. It is said that the Portuguese, Norman, Breton and English were able to adopt the cod's salt-based curing technique from Basque fishermen in Newfoundland near the cod-rich Grand Banks by the late 1400s. The dish first became popular among the elite, but eventually it was no longer the Canadians, but the Icelandic and the Norwegians exporting the fish to the Portuguese markets, rendering it cheaper and more accessible to the entire population. Additionally, seeing as the majority of the Portuguese population is catholic, the Catholic Church actually banned the consumption of meet quite frequently, therefore the people needed to find alternative foods to eat on those days, and thus turned to fish.

I had the luxury of savouring this delicacy three times throughout my week in Portugal, and I'll never forget the first time I had it. On our first day in Lisbon, my mom and I had ended up in a small waterfront restaurant, I'd assume unbeknownst to tourists, where the staff didn't even speak any English (luckily with my knowledge of Spanish and Italian the menus were easy enough to read and it wasn't difficult to order either). We opted for the bacalhau, and when it was ready a mere 15 minutes later, it was barely seasoned yet we tasted the natural salts of the fish. It was indeed quite fresh and delicious.

Back in Canada, the famous Portuguese food we always hear about is Portuguese chicken. If you walk down St. Laurent Boulevard, past Schwartz's, you'll even find the Portuguese village with a plethora of shops readily displaying their chickens on a skewer for all to see, yet if ever you do visit Portugal, it's not chicken that's on display everywhere, but the cod. Even if you're not a cod person, I would recommend at least sampling some delicious fresh bacalhau!

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