A Cook's Tour Read Online Free PDF Page A

things. His mania about top-quality fresh codfish (I’d never seen José yell until a seafood purveyor sent us cod that he found wanting), his love of high-test canned tuna in olive oil, white anchovies, costly sea salt, specially chiffonaded kale, dried chorizo, fresh and only fresh, wildly expensive whole cumin seeds from Kalyustan – all this made my food costs jump every time José walked through the door. He’d insist I buy specialty items for a rigorously French brasserie, things I’d have no idea what to do with; he’d get sudden compulsions to call D’Artagnan in the middle of the night and buy whole free-range pigs. For the first few months working with the guy, it used to irritate me. What was I going to do with all that quince jelly and weird sheep’s milk cheese? What the hell is Superbock beer? José would go into these fugue states, and the next thing you knew, I’d have buckets of salted codfish tongues soaking in my walk-in. You know how hard it is to sell codfish tongues on Park Avenue?
         And he talked continually about the pig slaughter – as if it were the World Series, the Super Bowl, the World Cup, and a Beatles reunion all rolled into one. I had to take his enthusiasm seriously. Not just because he’s the boss but also because along with all that Portuguese stuff that would mysteriously arrive came food that even I knew to be good. Food I could identify and understand as being part of a tradition of glorious excess, French-style: fresh white asparagus, truffles in season, Cavaillon melons, fresh morels, translucent baby eels, Scottish wild hare, gooey, smelly, runny French cheeses, screamingly fresh turbot and Dover sole, yanked out of the Channel yesterday and flown (business class, I think, judging from the price) to my kitchen doors. I had more than enough evidence that José knew how to eat. If he told me that killing and eating a whole pig was something I absolutely shouldn’t and couldn’t miss, I believed him. It’s very hard to not be hungry after talking to José for any length of time.
         So it was with a mixture of excitement, curiosity, and dread that I woke up on a cold, misty morning in Portugal and looked out the window of my room at orderly rows of leafless grapevines, the fires from distant hearths issuing smoke into a gray sky over the valley. Where I was staying was a bed-and-breakfast, a seventeenth-century quinta (a private home turned country inn) about half a mile from the Meirelles farm. It was set back from a twisting country road, past an arbor, surrounded by fields and orange groves and mountains, looking in every way as it must have four hundred years ago. Three young women looked after a few guests. There was a chapel, and a large dark country kitchen with a constantly burning wood fire and a long table. A vast carbon-blackened hooded chimney allowed most of the smoke to escape. The predominant smell in Portugal, I had quickly found, is wood smoke. The only source of heat in the large house – in my room, as well – was a burning fire. When I’d arrived late the previous night, there was one going in my room, creating a nice toasty zone, just large enough to undress and climb into the high four-poster bed. José’s family, in addition to their farm, have a home in nearby Amarante, and another residence in Oporto.
         By the time I’d arrived here, I’d already gotten the picture that Portugal has plenty of good stuff to eat. I’d eaten head of pescada (a sort of oversized whiting), roast kid goat cooked in an old wood-burning oven, the doors sealed with plaster (they used to be sealed with cow dung), an incredible octopus risotto, and, of course, bacalhau, bacalhau, bacalhau (salted codfish). I’d spent a night in a roundhouse on a mountaintop in the Douro Valley, awakened in a torrential rainstorm to descend quickly (before the roads washed out) to a quinta at the bottom, where I had roast loin of pork, potatoes roasted in pork fat, and