There are some foods after which I must go to sleep. In Britain, it tends to be a Sunday roast. If my sisters and I are home at my mum’s house and she’s done a chicken, lots of veg and an endless parade of potatoes (doused in gravy), and then afterwards presented us all with a rhubarb crumble (covered in enough custard to drown a medium-sized town), the only viable option is to go and vie for space on the sofa to nap until the football is on.
This is one of the reasons I don’t really enjoy going out for a roast. I want to be so gluttonous as to incapacitate myself. How do people eat all those Yorkshire puddings before drinking for the rest of the afternoon?
In Portugal, I find a similar situation unfolds after eating cozido, a traditional pork-filled stew which, I’m sorry to say, given the word has effectively lost almost all meaning, is boundlessly “hearty”. It is also inelegant, much the same as a roast (another reason I don’t care for them while out; stop trying to make them look pretty) and economical. There might be any part of any animal in a cozido à portuguesa, although as with so many things in Portugal, mostly it’s about the pork.
Cozido is one of Portugal’s national dishes, long entwined in the nation’s heritage. It is a warming mix of vegetables, variable meat and smoked sausage, and it’s a stew eaten by everyone, from farm hands to Lisbon dignitaries. The former would have it in the morning with a shot of medronho – a moonshine-like spirit made from arbutus berries, the fruit of the strawberry tree – to better equip themselves for toiling in the fields.
Unlike peri-peri chicken and pastel de natas, it isn’t much of a famous export. Which seems odd to me because it’s far better than both. Start a variation of Nando’s based on this stew and I should think you’d be on to a winner.
Most recently, I sat down to cozido at a place called São Lourenço do Barrocal, a farmstead and estate in the central region of Alentejo, not far from the Spanish border. Barracol has been in the same family for more than 200 years.
For a time, under the nationalist dictatorship of Salazar, it was taken over by the state and run into the ground. These days the eighth-generation José Antonio has refurbished the place. Now the fine olive groves are back, so too the winery and the horses, and there are guest rooms, a restaurant, a swimming pool and so on.
I ate cozido outside with a man I met in Las Vegas, Diogo. I didn’t know he would be there.
Six months earlier, we had together been at the World’s 50 Best Restaurants after-after party being bought drinks by a drunk Ukrainian gambler. An hour or so before, another journalist had given me an edible and for a time I thought my name was Terry. To this day, I’ve no idea how I made it to my hotel room.
Life flashed by and suddenly we were in much less frenetic surrounds. In place of blaring screens, blazing music and large Americans handing out cigars was an outdoor courtyard, open fire and the smell of fresh thyme, woodsmoke, and olives crushed under hooves.
It was late autumn, a little cold. We had glasses of the estate wine, mineral-clad and gentle, quite dry but with a late flurry of floral notes so as to disarm and beguile.
This, with the cozido, was an afternoon to savour: pork belly, trotter and ear, carrots and cabbage and onions sliced with abandon, and plump beans like pert little buttocks that had been cooked until soft; all this in a rich, umami-crafted stock.
“Put your bread at the bottom of the soup”, Diogo told me. And I did. It was farmers’ bread, chewy, appearing almost stale. After a swim in the stew, it made sense.
After three bowls of this and a few glasses of wine, what else is there to do but sleep? And so I excused myself, strolled on imperfect cobblestones, the sun shining on white barn walls, and made my way over to the horses, who came over to inspect me before journeying back to their barrels of hay. And I lay on the grass, replete, just as I would do on the sofa after a roast.
When I awoke, I half thought I was back home, expecting a call to go out for a walk. But no, I was in the middle of Portugal, quite chilly, with the horses, enjoying the sort of fullness only made possible by dishes like cozido.
