Of the Sea,

And Into My Belly

In Prague, fish and shellfish are rare. Most restaurants don’t have any seafood, save sometimes a piece of salmon (probably farmed in Norway.) Also rare are seafood stores. I think I encountered two in Prague, on opposite sides of the city. Both had the air of speciality stores. 

I like that the Czechs eat this way. They do so because until very recently, the ocean was far, far away. As was refrigeration or any way to routinely keep fresh fish edible. So the Czechs ate what was around them, and developed a cuisine around those things: potatoes (yes brought from the New World), dumplings, meat, goose, pork and cabbage. And that is still what Czechs eat. 

Sure, seafood now could be easily brought in from the coast, say Italy, which is only a half day’s drive away. But food culture endures long after the conditions that gave rise to it change. I like that. We may all carry smart phones, but we eat different things in different places. It helps make the world a varied place. Okay, pizza, hamburgers and kebabs, the sacred trilogy as a friend of mine says, are available everywhere. But they should be the exception, not the rule. 

While I was in Prague, I endeavored to eat Czech. To eat the dishes of Bohemia and Moravia. And I succeeded, as readers of this newsletter can vouch. My blood pressure went up some, but I enjoyed many plates of goulash. Usually with a half liter of good pilsner.

But now we are near the coast, in the municipality of Odemira in The Alentejo region of Portugal. And I have already begun to explore the local cuisine with its particular emphasis on seafood.

I haven’t internetted it, but Portugal probably has 1000 miles of coast. And the Portuguese have centuries of eating seafood and catching it for their livelihood. So every restaurant offers seafood, usually a large variety. 

Grocery stores are revealing. Even smaller ones have long cabinets of frozen seafood with cod, clams, octopus, squid and more, including many varieties I don’t recognize. That this frozen seafood is so ubiquitous shows how popular eating things from the ocean is here. 

So in this newsletter, I'm going to profile three meals in three days that I had in the past week. If this arouses some envy in my readership, well, I’m okay with that. 

Three Meals: 

Meal Number One: The first on Tuesday was at a simple restaurant, located next to the water, with checkered plastic tablecloths. I had grilled carapau. 

The backstory here is that a few days previously I had been in the city market of Sao Luis, a small village we stayed near for our first week. I was looking at the fish and chatted with one of the fish sellers there, a woman with a bright smile. I asked about the very small fish, each about the size of a finger. They weren’t sardines, she said, which were bigger and larger and also available. They were “carapau.” ( I could have just read the labels on the signs stuck in the ice, but as usual, the labels were hard to read because the names were just quick scrawls in cursive handwriting.) They looked good.

So when I saw them on the menu of this dockside restaurant, I wanted to try them. The waitress explained these weren’t the small  ones I had seen, but larger ones, suitable for grilling. The small ones are usually fried, she said. 

Carapau by the way translates into English as “horse mackerel.” That’s probably the most unappetizing name I’ve ever heard. I speculate that people used to feed it to the horses and thus the name.

Soon enough, the carapau was placed in front of me. Two fish, grilled with skin and heads on, sprinkled with salt, the skin charred. It was good. The flesh was off-white and had a lot of flavor. I was reminded of a bluefish in my hometown of Norfolk. Bluefish is only really good if it’s really fresh. I bet the same is true of carapau.

The big drawback of this larger carapau is that it was very bony. (Maybe you can just chew up the bones on smaller carapau. I’d like to find out.) Spines made their bed in every layer. I ate with my fingers mostly to avoid being stuck. After I finished, the young waitress told me she had her own personal techniques for eating around and lifting out the bones. Maybe she can show me next time.

Meal Number Two: My second meal on Wednesday was at a fancy restaurant on a cliff that we ate at sort of by accident. We had heard there was a restaurant near this fishing harbor, and we had expected a casual one, like the one where we’d eaten the previous day. But instead we found a very nice, very fancy restaurant. We said what the heck.

At our outside table, the waiter brought over on a tray a bunch of fresh fish to consider for our dinner. We chose a fish called cherne, which my app translated as grouper. I don’t remember grouper, which is common in Tidewater, Virginia, being so thick. It could have been carved into steaks. There was about a third of this grouper left. We ordered it partly because it was about a kilo, enough for three people without being way too much. It came out 10 to 20 minutes later, grilled. The waiter fileted it for us. He then proceeded to dump a big pile of freshly cooked tiny clams over it, clams cooked in plenty of garlic and butter.

The clams and the fish together were fabulous. EC loved the clams so much I had to fight her for them. Luckily - for EC and me - K doesn’t usually eat clams. But even she ate and liked a couple of these little ones.

With the fish, we had as a side “coriander rice”, which you see a lot on Portuguese menus, but I had never had before. This preparation was very soupy with a lot of cilantro in it. It was fabulous too. I will have to learn how to make this.

Meal Number Three: Thursday’s meal was at another restaurant on a different cliff, also overlooking the ocean. It was outside any town, and was what you would call a destination restaurant. But a casual one. It had wooden picnic tables outside, and nice but not fancy tables and decor inside.

Here we really went to town. I was living up to my vow to eat seafood, whenever possible. To eat each meal as if it were my last. 

We ordered three appetizers: barnacles, clams, and shrimp. The barnacles were primarily for me. I had never seen these before Portugal. Folks at another table were eating them, in a serious, intent way, and they gave me tips on eating them. The barnacles, called “percebes” in Portuguese, were big oversized things that look like the knuckles of a monster. You break them open and suck out a big piece of salty flesh. Each knuckle gives you a pretty good chunk of meat, so collectively it’s a fair amount of food. All for me. EC at least tried one. K refused.

One big takeaway about barnacles is that they are served without any butter or garlic. Eating them was a very clean experience. But less hedonistic than eating say clams or roasted oysters, where you virtually always have some sort of buttery sauce. 

I did not love my barnacles, but I will order them again. I may learn to love them.

As for our other appetizers: The clams were good, but not as good as the ones the night before. EC, whose judgment I trust, did not like them. The shrimp I’ll skip describing. 

After these appetizers, came three separate main dishes. Mine was a fricassee of ray. That is what it was called in Portuguese. I had expected some sort of rice dish with chunks of fish in it. I remember Elmer Fudd talking about the fricassee of rabbit.

Instead, what came was a giant hunk of fan-shaped fish covered in hollandaise sauce. So that was a surprise. The bright yellow sauce covered the white meat which was on top of the cartilage-like skeleton of the ray. 

It was really, really good. The fish was fresh and there was plenty of it. And it is hard to resist the hollandaise sauce. 

After our three main dishes, we had three desserts. We were really eating big. It was a ridiculously large amount of food. We don’t usually eat like this, but sometimes I order with the goal of sampling many dishes rather than finishing all of them.

Portions here in Portugal tend to be large, and often huge. I theorize that the huge portions are a legacy of Portugal being a really poor country until pretty recently. In poor countries, a premium is put on feeding one well. They want you to go away satisfied. That’s my theory. 

Sharing seems to be perfectly okay here, so K and I have already talked of adopting a habit of sharing an appetizer and sharing a main dish, as we proceed here in Portugal. But we did not do that on Thursday’s  meal. Instead we ordered way too much food. I’m fine with that. After all, we were on vacation! We weren’t yet in our long-term rental, EC hadn’t started school, so we were in vacation mode. 

How were the prices for all this seafood? 

Many things are cheap here in Portugal. An espresso is usually about 75 cents. A half-liter of house wine may cost 3 euros. But good fish and shellfish are not cheap, although also not insanely expensive. My carapau cost 14 euros. The barnacles, clams and shrimp cost 15 euros each. My fricassee of ray cost 20 euros, if memory serves. The grouper with sides in the fancy restaurant, which did feed three of us, cost 80 euros. 

My takeaway from all this eating is that so far, I am living up to my vow to eat of the sea, a lot, here in Portugal. To move from dumplings and gravy to salty things hauled up from the Atlantic. 

In other matters, EC attended her first day of school this week. We are sending her to the local public school. We are told she will easily learn Portuguese in the way that only young children can. We are anxious about this, but also excited. We are all now learning Portuguese. I’ll keep you informed.

Late Breaking News! 

My tardiness is your reward. Because I tarried in getting this newsletter out, I can tell you about visiting the city market this Saturday morning. This market, housed in its own building as a  good city market should be, is open weekdays but is bigger and better on Saturday mornings, as is also typical. 

The fish and seafood sellers were the stars of the show. Under the peaked ceiling were about a dozen fish sellers, each with their own area with fish and other products of the sea on a bed of ice. So many different kinds of fish. Here are some that I saw: Chocos, Abrotea, Linguado, Dourada, Cantaeilho, Robalo, Sargos, Carapau, Ova pescada. Those were the signs I could read. They translate into English as Cuttlefish, Forkbeard, Sole, Dorada, Redfish, Sea Bass, Bream, Mackerel and Fish Roe.

I bought a one kilo (two and a quarter pound) sargo (bream) for lunch. My plan is to bake it in parchment paper. I don’t know a lot about cooking fish, but K says this is a good way. I hope to learn more about preparing fish here in Portugal. The fish seller took my bream, then cut along its backbone (I don’t know why), scaled it, and gutted it at the counter with running water behind him. This fish was fresh!  

Our town is not so big. How can this many fish sellers sell enough to make it worthwhile? I believe the fish sellers are gone by noon, while the vegetable sellers remain. What happens to the fish that doesn’t sell? Does it go to restaurants? I don’t know. 

I  hope to get this newsletter out before lunch. I bet it will be good.