Portugal’s heaven on earth

Together with some kindred souls (more like kindred stomachs!) and media, we had the privilege to lunch with the congenial raconteur, Portu-guese Ambassador Joao Caetano da Silva, and his gracious wife Ulrike, at the Inter-Continental Manila’s Café Jeepney last week.

We learned from Ambassador Da Silva that Portugal’s yearly tourist arrival exceeds the country’s population of 10.5 million. Wow, that’s a lot of dollars and jobs, I thought. We also learned the three revealed secrets of the apparition at Fatima, one of which is the attempted assassination of the Pope. Fellow foodie Makati Rep. Teddy Boy Locsin was quick to add it was not the attempted assassination of the Pope in Manila by Bolivian artist Mendoza during the Marcos years.

As a foodie, what I remembered most from the ambassador’s own revelations are two things: First, one experiences paradise, hell and back to paradise every day in Lisbon; and second, it is considered a sin not to drink Portuguese wine with your meal while in Portugal.

I have been to Portugal only once, way back in 1980, but after our lunch with the senhor, I would like to add Portugal to my wish list again. I want to experience its daily paradise and certainly vow not to commit the Portuguese sin. According to the ambassador, it is paradise, hell and back to paradise because you start your day with a good breakfast. That is paradise. Portugal is famous for its breads, made only of the usual four ingredients – wheat flour, water, yeast and salt – but kneaded long till the dough springs to life, and then baked in wood-stoked brick or stone ovens for that faintly smoky flavor.

Then, one faces the horrible traffic with all Portuguese drivers instantly feeling they own the road as long as they hold the steering wheel. (Sounds familiar, isn’t it?) The Portuguese apparently are a different species altogether when on the road. Now, that is hell.

And the mid-day break is a hearty two-hour lunch, another heaven. And then another battle on the road, till they come home for a wonderful dinner ending with a nice glass of port. They are back in heaven and sleep with a smile.

It is considered a sin not to have wine with your Portuguese meal because Portugal’s vinhos verdes are reputed to be excellent. It puzzles me though why red and white wines are called such. Most probably, the term comes from the lush green forests, or the word green is to mean young, since vinhos verdes are not allowed to mature in the same way as normal table wine. They are light and refreshing with only eight to 11 percent alcohol. For many years, port wine is the only wine many people associate with Portugal. Today, the country has an exciting wide range of excellent wines.

Now, I was ready to experience Portuguese paradise and not commit the Portuguese sin. But on second thought, it made me wonder why I have to go all the way to Portugal when I can have the paradise bit here at the Manila Intercon. And the hell part, too, when I brave the traffic going to and back home from Makati City.

Lunch started with cod salad steeped in vinaigrette, which was a stringy bacalao (salted cod being Portugal’s national dish, and my personal favorite). Then we had a meat pie with salpicao ham. This is not the usual empanada (turnover) as we know it. It is a four- to five-inch bread cut in small rectangles with a thin slice of raw ham sandwiched in the middle. Don’t get misled with the word salpicao for it is not what we Filipinos know as beef salpicao. It is more the jamon serrano type. Though famous in Portugal, I did not find anything special about this empanada, since it was rather dry and heavy on the starch and the ham filling a bit wanting.

The pickled mackerel (ceviche) came next, so small they reminded me of our tawilis. It is much like our kinilaw. What followed next was the boiled pig’s ear with green sauce. It was crunchy but not hard, while the green sauce (from chopped parsley?) was mixed with vinegar and finely chopped onions. Mary Ann liked it so much she had three servings of it. This dish is very similar to the original Pampango sisig, where the dish is boiled and served to pregnant women to strengthen the unborn baby’s bones. This original sisig of yore was boiled pig’s ears mixed with sukang puti or white vinegar, much like kinilaw, until an entrepreneur Angeleña named Aling Lucing reinvented it to what we now know and enjoy as sizzling sisig.

Then came everyone’s favorite, grilled Portuguese sausage. Dark red in color, garlicky and salty in flavor, this was a hands-down favorite, especially to those with salty taste buds, like Mary Ann. Then, we had blood sausage, interestingly served with fresh pineapple cuts. Compared to the Spanish morcilla, which has rice in it, this Portuguese sausage is milder in taste and the pineapple offsets its saltiness. And if you do not like the taste of pineapple, the sausage was just as wonderful with a hard crust roll and butter.

Our soup, mysteriously called vegetable soup with stone, was a mixture of pig’s ear, chorizo, beans, potatoes and carrot. I enjoyed it very much with a hard crust roll. Again, according to our host, the ambassador, around 30 years ago, when Portugal was a poor country (maybe one day, we too can say that line when our tourism finally takes off), people had only this hot soup and bread for their meals. And thus today, Portugal has many wonderful soup recipes.

This soup brought back memories of my trip to Portugal back in 1980. Traveling on a shoestring budget of $10 a day, that soup and bread made up my main meal, too. It was a most satisfying meal in itself, especially to warm and fill the stomach in the dead of winter.

But why is it called vegetable soup with stone? This time, the very good-looking chef Luis Miguel Marques Caseiro, elucidated that, in the olden days, there was a monk who begged for food. All he had with him was a stone. Whatever they gave him, he put all together and cooked with the stone. This is the dish he came up with, he said. "Although, your soup today was not cooked with stone", the chef assured us.

Now, for the main course (yes, we still had room for it). We were served tenderloin steak Portuguese-style. The sauce was mixed with red wine vinegar, which to me was very unusual but surprisingly added a very nice and delicious touch making the red meat lighter in taste. It was, however, cooked a bit well done, making it a bit dry and tough, and I always want my steak rare (and big!).

And finally, the most awaited part of the meal, for the ladies at least, the dessert (never mind if their stomachs were already bursting.) To everyone’s delight, we were served a flan-like Abbot of Priscos pudding, similar to our tocino del cielo, but bigger in portion and less richer in taste. Writers Bambi Harper and CJ Juntereal started asking everyone to guess how many egg yolks were needed in every serving. Mary Ann guessed it right with three egg yolks. "Because," she said, "the tocino has one egg yolk each and this pudding is a little more than three times the size and not as eggy in taste." But what no one was able to guess was that the sweet pudding was flavored with smoked ham. I would never have guessed that.

It was an eight-course sit-down Portuguese lunch; and of course, we did not commit the Portuguese sin because we enjoyed all the dishes with complementing vinhos verdes. And there is more where all these came from. According to chef Luis, he arrived in Manila with an excess baggage of Portuguese chorizos and other ingredients, all to be served buffet-style for lunch at the Café Jeepney until Oct. 26. The menu will slightly change daily, but chef Luis assured me they will always have my favorite bacalao cooked in different ways.

And to those who do not want to commit the second sin, Intercon’s PR director Jenny Peña had arranged a complementing Portuguese wine buffet (from Caves Dom Teodosio, one of Portugal’s most prestigious wine companies) for an additional P600 per person.

So, in one day, I had a taste of Portuguese paradise; I did not commit the Portuguese sin and I faced the hell of a traffic after. I may not have ended my day with a Portuguese dinner and a nice port, but I had my beautiful wife next to me in bed. That is heaven to me and I do sleep nightly with a smile.

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Experience Portugal in Manila at Café Jeepney of InterCon Manila for lunch and dinner at P950++ per person, until Oct. 26. For reservations, call 815-9711 local 262.