It is the Yuletide season here in Odemira, Portugal. We are enjoying it while also noting what makes it different from the United States.
One difference is that Christmas Eve is the main day, which I hear is the case in Germany as well.
On the night of Christmas Eve a celebratory meal is held. Traditionally, the main dish is - get this - salt cod boiled with vegetables. That doesn’t sound too celebratory to me! But apparently it can be really good. Non traditionalists serve a whole turkey. Another pernicious American influence! I like turkey, but I like traditional customs better.
After dinner on Christmas Eve, the Portuguese open their presents. Many stay up until midnight to do so, even the youngest children, which means bedtime is often not until the wee hours of the morning, says our language teacher Paula, who is local and our primary source.
With the presents already open, and the big formal meal eaten, Christmas day is more for sleeping late, and hanging out with family. A big meal is usually eaten then as well, but it’s a casual and could just be leftovers.
We weren’t ready to give up opening our presents and stockings on Dec 25, but we did opt to have our main celebratory meal on Christmas eve.
With the help of my sister Jane, who we had the good luck to have visiting and is quite the cook, we served oysters from the Algarve that we grilled outside, along with “grelos”, a Portuguese green vaguely similar to broccoli rabe. Jane cooked the greens Chinese style with garlic. The greens and oysters were great together.
After that, we had lamb that I had also grilled outside, accompanied by some of these great local sweet potatoes and “tomato rice,” which is a common dish here similar to risotto, except easier to make. The lamb I had bought at one of the local butchers. I had the man take out the bone from a small leg of lamb, and then open the meat up for easy grilling. I’ve done this before and it’s a nice way to make lamb and easy to do. I have broiled it in an oven when I don’t have access to a grill.
Everyone enjoyed our Christmas Eve meal, and I could see continuing this custom. Having the fancier meal gave a focal point to the evening, and I liked not having to worry about it while opening presents Christmas morning.
And while we are on the subject, Merry Christmas! Thank you for subscribing to this newsletter, whether paid or unpaid. I enjoy telling you my thoughts and opinions, as well as what I am hearing and seeing. And I enjoy your comments.
Also, I encourage you to wish others well for the holiday you celebrate. Which might be Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa or Saturnalia. This makes more sense to me than saying “Happy Holidays,” which to me begs the question of what holiday exactly is being celebrated? Someone close to me - okay Ms K - says it makes no sense to wish someone well for a holiday they don’t celebrate, but I beg to differ.
I celebrate our year-end holiday in a secular way, or maybe I should say pagan way. There is a lot of evidence that Christians two millennia ago basically grafted a celebration of Jesus’s birth onto existing big holidays celebrating the Winter solstice and life in the midst of so much cold and darkness. Many of the customs central to our holiday, like the decorated evergreen tree and a fat man giving out presents, arguably stem from these pre Christian celebrations.
But there are certainly practicing Christians around who do celebrate the holiday in a religious way and that is fine with me too.
Tummy Time: Cilantro and Garlic, A Winning Pair
On one of our holiday meals out, we ate at a good local restaurant, known for doing traditional Portuguese fare well. Because it was a holiday and a time for splurging, I ordered several appetizers, including a salad of pigs’ ears. This was kind of a dare move on my part, done to impress my teenage son. The pig’s ear salad turned out to be really good. It was bits of cold ear covered with fresh cilantro and raw garlic. The two of us were the only ones who ate any of it, but we really liked it.
The Portuguese combine raw and cooked garlic and fresh cilantro a lot, and they do indeed go together well.
For my main dish that night, I had the boldness to order a vegetarian option I spotted. It was Açorda soup, made with black-eyed peas and sweet potatoes. Açorda soup is a common Alentejo soup made with bread and garlic and cilantro, to which other stuff is sometimes added, including egg and salt-cod. This was the first time I had seen blacked-eyed peas and sweet potato in it. That sounded delicious, so I gave it a try, even though I usually eschew vegetarian options. It was really good, and I was glad I had given up fancier fare like grilled fish or meat. As in the pig’s ear salad, the soup had big pieces of raw or almost raw garlic, and I really liked it.
I also liked thinking of the kitchen staff marveling at someone ordering pigs ears and a vegetarian soup.
Glad you liked the pig ears. I believe I ordered them several years ago in Spain but found them too fatty. Or perhaps it was a different pig part, maybe the jowls or lips? You’re also lucky to have had Max to share the experience. Often I’m alone to attempt to finish off an appetizer, as with the pig meat and more recently some foi gras in Paris which was delicious but too rich for one person and left me feeling, hours later, slightly nauseous due most likely to the high fat content.