Hank Shaw | Serves 4

The flavors in here are purely Portuguese—garlic, chile peppers, bay leaves, paprika, sweet wine, olive oil.  Having never been to Portugal, I have no idea if they hunt doves there. I do know that these flavors are off the hook on dove. They’re buzzed in a food processor until smooth and used as a marinade.

Doves are especially good marinated because they’re so small. According to food scientist Harold McGee, marinades penetrate meat to a depth of only about 1/4 inch during an overnight soak. This is more than enough to get to the center of a whole dove. If you’re not a hunter, use domestic squab for this recipe—just make sure to lower the number of birds per person to one or two, as squab is a lot larger than dove. The marinade will still penetrate more than halfway through the squab’s meaty parts. Like duck, dove (and squab) is red meat and should be grilled only to medium or medium-rare.

Unfortunately for non-hunters, doves cannot be bought. They must be hunted. However, you can get very close to the flavor of wild dove by buying farm-raised squab, which is young pigeon. Squab is available in some gourmet markets as well as online from the California Squab Producers.–Hank Shaw

LC What to Sip Note: These delicate little birds are deceptively robust in terms of flavor. As such, they require a glass of something sturdy. As Hank Shaw, who expounds upon his dove-hunting antics, once told us, “Drink a lusty Touriga Naçional with these birds, and you won’t be disappointed.”

Active time: 15 minutes | Total time: 30 minutes, not including marinating.

Grilled Doves Recipe

Directions

David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Potter, 2009 | Serves 6 to 8 as a side dish

Your first thought when you saw a side dish of onions, chestnuts, and bacon was Thanksgiving, right? Well, the Portuguese don’t celebrate the holiday, but they do grow  plenty of chestnuts. When something is as vital to the local economy as chestnuts are to the Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro region, people find plenty of ways to cook and eat it throughout the year. While living in Portugal, I had chestnuts in soups, bread, and dessert, but I’d never had them tossed with onions and bacon, as they are in this dish adapted from a recipe by chef Michel da Costa. It makes sense. The nuts are an excellent foil for the saltiness of the bacon and the caramel sweetness of the onions.

Not surprisingly, it makes for a crowd-pleasing Thanksgiving side dish and will be on our table this year. Again.–David Leite

LC Know Your Chestnuts Note: This recipe calls for cooked chestnuts, which you can find in a jar or vacuum-packed bag. Those gorgeous nuts you see in big bins this of year are a pain to roast and peel, but more than that: they can be starchy tasting. If you have the luxury of both jarred and vacuum-packed chestnuts, picked the jarred. Fewer broken casualties that way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-r2dowH74

Sautéed Onions, Chestnuts, and Bacon Recipe

Directions

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1. In a large skillet, cook the bacon over medium-low heat, stirring often, until the fat has rendered and the meaty bits start to crisp, about 12 minutes. Transfer to paper towels to drain.

2. Meanwhile, fill a bowl with ice and water and set aside. Bring a medium saucepan of water to a boil. Drop in the onions and blanch for 30 seconds. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and plop them into the ice water. To peel the onions, snip off the tip and remove the papery outer layers. Set aside the onions.

3. Raise the heat under the skillet to medium, plonk in the onions, and sauté in the bacon fat, stirring occasionally, until spotted with brown and cooked through, 8 to 10 minutes. Add the chestnuts, cooked bacon, and honey and toss to warm through, being careful not to break the nuts–they’re fragile. Season with salt and plenty of pepper and then scoop into a decorative bowl. Sprinkle with the parsley.

David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Clarkson Potter, 2010 | Serves 4 to 6

Crab is a favorite shellfish of the Portuguese, and one of the most famous dishes is santola no carro–a creamy crab salad served in its shell. This gazpacho recipe, from my friend and chef Fausto Airoldi, takes all those flavors and plunks them in the middle of this lesser-known but utterly refreshing soup.–David Leite

Active time: 30 minutes Total time: 30 minutes, not including chilling

Portuguese White Gazpacho Recipe

Directions

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David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Clarkson Potter, 2010 | Serves 6 to  8

Arroz de pato, or duck with rice, is a specialty of the Minho region. Traditionally it’s made by first boiling then roasting the duck to cook it and make a stock, then later roasting shredded bits of the meat along with the rice. But I find this technique leaves the bird flavorless and dry. Plus, to degrease the stock, it takes another day. This riff, which is inspired by my friend, chef Vitor Veloso, calls for braising the legs in chicken stock, shredded, then shredding the meat and stirring into a creamy risotto, along with the de rigueur ingredients–presunto (cured ham), chouriço (spicy sausage), and orange zest. Adorning the top are slices of perfectly seared duck breast. Much faster, infinitely easier, and far more sophisticated.–David Leite

David’s Ducks in a Row Note: Risotto has a potential to send people shrieking into the hills. And for what? It’s really a cinch to make a great pot of risotto. All you need is patience and a lot of broth. I’ve made this risotto more times that I can count. But a few weeks ago, I was rushed and I did the unthinkable–I resorted to a bargain brand of canned chicken broth and I bought some duck on sale. Needless to say, the dish had nary a hint of flavor. Properly chastened, I made it again shortly thereafter, but this time I returned to my old duck standby, D’Artagnan, which I’d used previously. Then I made a duck stock out o some excellent chicken stock along with D’Artagnan’s Duck and Veal Demi-Glace and two of their moulard legs and a magret half-breast. This time, the risotto was as I’d remembered: sensational. I don’t often mention brand names, as it feels like a commercial, but considering how much better the dish was, I believe it’s my duty and is well worth the price. Now carry on.–David Leite

Active time: 1 hours, 30 minutes Total time: 2 hours, 45 minutes not including cooling.

Portuguese Duck Risotto Recipe

Directions

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David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Clarkson Potter, 2009 | Serves 12 to 14

This orange-olive oil cake was, without a doubt, the hardest recipe to develop in The New Portuguese Table. Cindi Kruth, one of my recipe testers, and I made 13 versions of it until I knew it was as good as the recipe I got at Papas, the tiny restaurant up the hill from my apartment in Lisbon. The problem was—and I have no idea if this was intentional (you know how some cooks can be)—but they gave me a recipe for a classic chiffon cake. Yet their mighty bolo de laranja was dense and rich, and just one slice could satisfy even my appetite.

Friend and Portuguese food scholar Janet Boileau was smitten with the orange-olive oil cake and also went to work trying to figure it out. In the end, it took a call to the wonderful Lisbon chef Fausto Airioldi to help me get a handle on the dessert. He agreed with me that this was no stinking chiffon cake. It was too full of the bold flavors of Portugal. So, that’s when Cindi and I started from scratch, literally. Several weeks later, we came up with this. And if you had a chance to stop by one of my book signings, you would have had a sample. It’s what I always serve, and people always ask for, when I’m fending off those huge lines of three and four fans.—David Leite

LC Atenção Note: Make sure to use a light-colored Bundt pan. A dark one will turn out a cake that sticks and is unpleasantly brown. The pan David uses is the Nordic Ware’s Anniversary 15-cup Bundt Pan. And since this orange-olive oil cake only gets better with age, don’t even think about taking a bite until the day after you make it, or even the day after that.

Active time: 20 minutes Total time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Orange-Olive Oil Cake Recipe

Directions

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The grilled sardines lying on my plate are much larger than those stunted little things packed in tins that go by the same name in the U.S., and their eye sockets stare up at the ceiling, where hanging light fixtures are shaped like gourds. The aroma of sardines led me here, the scent sharp at first as it hit the nose (perhaps too sharp), until the smoky complexities took over, akin—at least for me—to a bouquet of wine. I take another sip from my glass of vinho verde and peer up at the small square of the TV perched on a high shelf beside the restaurant’s open door. The screen displays a smaller green rectangle of a soccer pitch, with the even smaller figures of the players racing back and forth.

Across the table in this typically narrow and crowded Lisbon tasca (mirroring the long and narrow streets of the Bairro Alto, an appealing neighborhood mix of funky shops and clothes drying on balconies), my 19-year-old ponytailed son, Nathaniel, sits enthralled by the beginning of this World Cup game: Portugal against the Netherlands. We’ve both caught some of the local futebol passion through a sneaky process of cultural osmosis, because there’s been no escape from the billboards, metro announcements, and TV ads that nearly all celebrate the World Cup games. For only the second time in history, a Portuguese team has made it to the second round, and tonight they’re fighting for a berth in the third round, the final eight. My normally sports-averse son is actually interested, maybe because I mentioned a few days ago that Jack Kemp had once denounced soccer, on the floor of the House of Representatives, as a “socialist sport.” It’s a well-worn tactic—as a kid, he finally ate his broccoli after my wife and I told him that the first President Bush hated the stuff. But Nathaniel also has a real gift for geometry, and maybe that’s what secretly attracts him as he keeps his eyes on the TV—the constant reshuffling of the players’ patterns on the pitch.

Already in the first minutes, the Dutch team has begun some serious harsh play, enough to draw two yellow warning cards, in what seems like an attempt to intimidate Portugal from the get-go. Nathaniel shuffles nervously in his seat, glances at me. On the flight over, I’d made the mistake of reading aloud passages about fan hooliganism from Franklin Foer’s marvelous How Soccer Explains the World. At the time, a description of one soccer thug’s arm that “folds around in a direction that would defy a healthy network of joints and tendons” made for some good head-slapping, eye-rolling camaraderie on a long flight, but now I’m regretting it, because I’ve had to nag Nathaniel all day to get him to watch tonight’s game in a public place. I try listening in on the conversations of the people sitting at neighboring tables in an attempt to catch their mood, but spoken Portuguese—with all its succulent oos and ooshes, oishes and aows—still glides by too quickly for me, even after years of tutoring in the language.

Still, I’m happy just to be here. I love Lisbon.

I don’t know why I love Lisbon. But I jumped at the chance to participate in the international short-story conference being held here this week. What a gig—all I have to do is give a reading of one of my stories, manage as a panelist to say something remotely intelligent about literary editing, and collaborate on a video essay on the conference with my technically astute son, and then I get to wander around one of my favorite cities. When I’m walking its stone-cobbled streets, catching glimpses here and there of the bordering Tejo River, or taking in, from a vista on one of the city’s hills, the glorious staggered topography of the white buildings and their salmon-colored tile roofs, I feel that I’m also traveling some interior landscape, that those streets are leading to a place inside myself I haven’t yet located.

Our neighbors cheer and our waitress swirls an impromptu dance—Maniche, the Portuguese midfielder, has scored the first goal, one of those beautifully aimed strikes that, in replay, has an inevitability about it, as the ball slices through the shifting, open spaces of a tumble of defenders in a direct elegant line to the corner of the net. His long dark hair plastered in sweat against the sides of his exultant face, Maniche wades through an eruption of his teammates’ joy at the seemingly impossible having been so artfully accomplished.

I take another sip of the house wine, watch the continuing replays of the goal. I don’t know why I feel at home here, but I have a theory. My family on my father’s side is Scottish and Catholic. It’s not a popular mixture back in the home country, which is why my dad’s parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles emigrated en masse to New York in 1927—typical bad timing, two years before the Depression, but that’s another story. Why, when, and where, I’ve often wondered, did my family shed its Presbyterian roots?

On the banks of the Douro River in northern Portugal, there’s a port-wine vineyard called the Quinta dos Malvedos. In 1820, two Graham brothers who lived in Oporto, William and John (my grandfather’s first name was John, and my father’s, William!), worked for a trading company based in Glasgow (where my family comes from!), and they founded that quinta. Couldn’t my father’s family, almost 200 years ago, have raised grapes on the banks of the Douro River and eventually converted to Catholicism? And if some returned to Scotland (black sheep, certainly—why else leave a vineyard?), then back in Glasgow they paid the piper for their unwelcome faith.

It’s probably all bullshit, but I hold that shred of possibility to help explain why the full-throated, plaintive twists of a fado song can sometimes bring me close to tears, or why Portuguese saudade—a complicated feeling that combines sorrow, longing, and regret, laced perhaps with a little mournful pleasure—fits so easily in my own emotional baggage. There’s something beyond romantic delusion, something deeper, that beckons me: it’s a genetic thing, a need to cross the centuries and return home, if only for a little while. I’m sure any Scottish genealogy service could easily burst this fragile bubble, which is why I’ll never consult one.

Cries of despair rise around us. The Dutch team has gone a little crazy in their attempt to even the score. Cristiano Ronaldo, a team star, is the victim of a vicious kick and is forced to leave the game. The baby-faced player cries as he exits, which make his features appear even younger. Those damn Dutch—they made a little kid cry! Minutes later Cristiano’s teammate, Costinha, returns Dutch fire with a nasty foul—his second of the game—and he’s ejected with a red card. Yet, for all the rough stuff on the screen, the Portuguese maintain their good spirits. Nathaniel relaxes, nods at me: we’re far from English-soccer-fan hooliganism here.

During halftime, I continue to scrape the delicious sardines down to their spinal columns with great care and deliberation. I know I can’t make these babies last until the end of the game, so I order more wine, and if the match goes into overtime there’s always dessert to order and slowly savor.

Once the game resumes, it threatens to become a brawl. The referee is in over his head, and he starts throwing out so many yellow cards that the commentators on TV seem to have lost count. His attempts to control the roughhousing only further incite the players on both teams, and the foul fest continues. Even the Portuguese goalkeeper, Ricardo, draws a yellow card. It’s become the kind of game that could set off any number of silently ticking heart attacks.

Nathaniel starts throwing those looks at me again, but now they’re just a joke, because it’s clear that our amiable Portuguese neighbors take it all in lightly while tucking into their sardines and grilled pork ribs, and I feel a rush of affection for these people I don’t know. Yes, this is an important game, a crucial game, but I sense no barely suppressed rage beneath the surface. My neighbors seem to have their heads on straight: they’re enjoying the game, win or lose. I like these people. I’m even happier that Lisbon will soon be my home for the coming year, though it still seems more an imagined future than one that’s rapidly approaching. In a month I’ll return with my family, and my wife, Alma, will ply her anthropological skills studying Cape Verdeans, our daughter, Hannah, will start the sixth grade at a Portuguese school that’s a five-minute walk from our apartment, and I’ll finish writing a few books that have been begging for extended time and attention. I’ll finally learn Portuguese—because isn’t it true that simply breathing Lisbon air helps in memorizing the irregular conjugations of the preterit?

Now that we’ve passed the midpoint of the second half, the Dutch are deep into need-to-score desperation, and maybe their chance will come—the Portuguese team has been a man down since Costinha was ejected, and fatigue is setting in. Suddenly, Figo, the team captain, writhes on the ground, his hands covering his face, and everyone around us gasps at this possible further loss.

After the Dutch player Boulahrouz is ejected with a red card, Figo makes a remarkable recovery. On replay it’s clear that Figo was only lightly brushed on the chest by Boulahrouz’s elbow during a tight run for the ball and then, after a half of a tenth of a split-second’s hesitation, Figo reared his head back and began his face-clutching and wriggling dramatics, pouring it on for the benefit of the referee. It’s such flagrant fakery that we all cluck approval at the theatrics. After all, Boulahrouz was the one who injured Cristiano in the first half, and we’re satisfied with this imprecisely accomplished justice.

Soon, two more red cards cast a player on each side out of the game. Both teams are now, incredibly, playing with only nine men on the field. Somehow, the Portuguese manage in the final minutes to tough out their one-goal lead, and then the tasca crowd cheers and the waiters and waitresses rush out to the street to dance on the cobbled stones and sing a souped-up version of the national anthem.

Nathaniel and I wend our way through the dancing streets down to the subway, and while we wait, the Portuguese seem a bit surprised to me, as if they secretly didn’t believe they’d win this game. Perhaps unrestrained expressions of joy aren’t exactly local tender, perhaps worries already abound because the heavily favored English team will be playing Portugal in the next round. Then the subway cars arrive packed with revelers, many sporting goofy porkpie hats in the colors of the Portuguese flag, and again I get a sense from these celebrants—a slight, barely perceptible hesitation here and there—that any happiness leaving saudade behind may be uncharted territory.

Nathaniel and I reach our stop, and, as we begin our climb up the stairs to the street, the tiled walls echo with countless honking car horns from the street above. Outside, we watch the broad avenue packed with a traffic jam of delirious fans hanging from car windows or just managing to balance on the roofs, waving flags and shouting victory: Portugal! Portugal! Maybe it’s not so hard for saudade to take a temporary backseat after all. Back in our hotel room, I lean out of the window and listen to the horns and cheers echoing off of the same streets I’ll be wandering in the coming year, while I try to discover why I love Lisbon. I give in to my own glee, and for hours into the night the whole city sings.

Excerpted from The Moon, Come to Earth: Dispatches from Lisbon | University of Chicago Press, 2009
Article and photo © 2009  Philip Graham. All rights reserved.

Ingredients at hand, my 83-year-old mother was all set to teach me how to prepare sarde a beccafico, a Sicilian specialty made from fresh sardines stuffed with pine nuts, Pecorino, raisins, and parsley that’s traditionally rolled and arranged tails up so they resemble the garden warblers for which they’re named. I’d wanted to claim my culinary heritage by learning my mother’s technique for a favorite family dish. But first, I was determined to try the clock test, a measure I came across online that purportedly determines a sardine’s freshness.

When I mentioned this to my mother, she sighed. Raised on sardines pulled from Mediterranean waters less than a mile from her childhood home, she’d never heard of such a thing. She could tell just by looking at their moist bodies and glistening eyes that the sardines were fresh. “Can we just start preparing them?” she muttered in her native Sicilian dialect.

Nazaré, Portugal

Absolutely not, I insisted. Early that morning, before driving to my parents’ home in North Bergen, NJ, I’d driven 15 miles to the Portuguese district of Newark, known as the Ironbound, to snag the freshest sardines I could get on land.  The Ironbound is Sardine Central. Two to three times a week, a jet leaves Lisbon for Newark with silvery fresh sardines snared off the Portuguese coast near Nazaré, a postcard-pretty fishing village on the Atlantic. They’re then imported by Julio Pereira of the Ironbound’s Ideal Fish Market and delivered to Popular Fish Market, a mere two-minute drive away. Al Nata, who’s been selling fish at Popular for some 40 years, told me his sardinhas had been caught “maybe one day before—that’s it.” My mother’s local fishmonger, on the other hand, is less than a mile from her home. But he trucks sardines in just once a week.

When truly fresh, sardines have the richness of tuna but with a sharper bite. Those not blessed with a Mediterranean palate may find them tough to swallow—especially if they’ve been brought up on mild cod fillets and wan cocktail shrimp. Though not my experience, I’ve seen enough cartoons to know that in the average American thought bubble, sardines equate to cat food.

Nata’s sardines may change some minds. From June through mid-September, they’re at their plumpest and most compelling. “They carry that special oil,” Nata says. “You lay them on the barbecue and the flame comes right up. You can smell them five blocks away.” It’s an aroma, recalls Pereira, that sent most Americans running in the opposite direction when he arrived in the U.S. from Portugal in the early 1970s.

The preference for summer sardines is so strong in Portuguese circles that come mid-September, most of Nata’s customers switch to those that have been flash-frozen in season rather than make do with the fresh but skinny sardines that populate seafood counters the rest of the year, save for a window from December through mid-January when they’re once again pleasingly plump.

Part of the reason sardines are so stout is that they’re brimming with obscene amounts of the much ballyhooed, heart-healthy, inflammation-fighting omega-3 fatty acids, which also are responsible for sardines’ distinctive flavor. In addition, sardines contain copious amounts of calcium, vitamin B12, and certain trace minerals. There’s even a sardine diet, touted as “The secret to losing weight, fighting disease, and staying healthy for life!” by the book of the same name.

The tide of health consciousness has been stoked by the sardine’s stellar sustainability quotient, which has landed it on the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s coveted “super green list.”

And because sardines subsist largely on plants and not other fish, “they don’t accumulate mercury, PCBs, and all those nasties,” says Barry A. Costa-Pierce, director of the Rhode Island Sea Grant Program in Narragansett and a fisheries professor at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. “They’re grazers,” he says, just as he was about to pop open a can of sardines for lunch. “Aquatic cows grazing on plankton.”

Aficionados note a distinct difference between the taste of the western European sardine (Sardina pilchardus) and the western American sardine (Sardinops sagax). “They’re not as fatty,” Costa-Pierce says of the latter. “They’re just different. You’re actually tasting what they eat: the lipids and fatty acid components of the plankton of those areas.”

And therein lies the catch. In Portugal, Sicily, and other sardine-loving lands, the fish’s flavor is regarded as paramount. In the States, it’s viewed as something to be tolerated along the way to wellness, if at all. When I attended a tony launch party at Nisi Estiatorio, a Greek seafood restaurant in Englewood, NJ, I was dismayed to see editors from a leading food publication turn up their noses at chef John Piliouras’s pan-fried bite-size portions of sardines on Greek country bread.

Six months later, I treated my Sicilian-born father to an 88th birthday lunch at the same restaurant. My father doesn’t particularly enjoy eating out in restaurants because he’s used to fine food in the comfort of his own home. But this meal did his heart as much good as it did mine. He zestily devoured a plate of six whole grilled sardines that were brushed, Greek style, with latholemono, a lemon-and-olive-oil emulsion. He proclaimed them cooked “a perfezione.”

Just about every seafaring culture has developed a way to cope with or complement sardines’ assertive flavor. The Japanese rely on miso, soy sauce, salt-curing, or sake to temper the brash bite. In Galicia, sardines seasoned with garlic and onions are smothered in tomato sauce and hidden within empanada dough. In Venice, they’re fried alongside artichoke and fennel wedges. In Calabria, sardines are dressed in a sauce of mint, lemon zest, garlic, and vinegar. In Liguria, they’re baked amid a tangle of sautéed beet greens. In Sicily, they figure not just in sarde a beccafico, but in the island’s signature dish, pasta con le sarde, which is bucatini dressed with a mixture of sardine, sultanas, saffron, pine nuts, and wild fennel. In fact, island lore boasts that Winston Churchill repeatedly returned to Taormina as much for that dish as for the view. Sardines are also fancied in the British Isles, where Cornish and Devon fisherfolk bake them into stargazy pie, positioning the sardines so their little heads poke up around the edge of the crust.

But for purists, nothing beats the classic Portuguese treatment: whole plump sardines grilled with just a sprinkling of sea salt, eaten with their hands and accompanied by a glass of hearty vinho and a hunk of cornmeal broa to sop up the excess juices. Americans would do well to hold the burgers and instead toss a few sardines on the grill. There’s no time like summer to get them while they’re fat and fresh.

The morning of my clock test, I picked up a sardine by its head. I explained to my mother that I’d be able to tell if it was fresh by relating the angle at which its body flopped to the face of a clock. Anything between 12 and 3 o’clock was considered acceptable. Another sigh. My mother’s eyes directed my attention to the fish in my hand. It hadn’t moved. At all. Each of the others proved equally firm. Transfixed at the stroke of 12, all of them passed the clock test with flying colors—not bad for a batch of fish that had flown over the same ocean from which they’d been plucked. “See? They are really fresh,” I said.

My mother, on the other hand, didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Her eyes chided “I told you so,” loud and clear.

Recipe

Sarde a Beccafico | Stuffed Sardines

Article  © 2010 Mary Ann Castronovo Fusco. All rights reserved.

Photos © 2009 draculina_ak, 2009 and 2008  Fr Antunes.  All rights reserved.

David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Clarkson Potter, 2009 | 4 servings

A cataplana, a fixture in the Algarve, is kind of a spiritual cousin to the pressure cooker. Shaped like a giant clam, the hinged pan clamps down during cooking, locking in the juices of its contents. When carried to the table and popped open, it fills the room with steam redolent of the sea. If you’re bereft of a cataplana, a Dutch oven with a tight-fitting lid works perfectly, if less attractively.

I first had this meaty cataplana 12 years ago in Bridgewater, Connecticut, of all places, at the home of my friends Manny Almeida and Kevin Bagley. Manny, who’s from the same Azorean island as my family, just whipped it up one summer evening. I’ve since had it many times in Portugal, most memorably at an ocean-side joint in the town of Sagres, just east of the vertiginous promontory where Henry the Navigator supposedly built a school and shipyard for his sailors.—David Leite

convert Ingredients
3 tablespoons olive oil
8 ounces chouriço, linguiça, or dry-cured smoked Spanish chorizo, cut into 1/4-inch coins
One 1/4-inch-thick slice presunto, Serrano ham, or prosciutto, trimmed of excess fat and cut into 1/4-inch cubes
2 medium yellow onions, cut lengthwise in half and sliced into thin half-moons
1 Turkish bay leaf
4 garlic cloves, minced
One 28-ounce can whole peeled tomatoes, preferably San Marzano, drained and chopped
1/4 cup dry white wine
1/2 teaspoon sweet paprika
4 pounds small clams, such as cockles, manila, butter, or littlenecks, scrubbed and rinsed
Freshly ground black pepper
3 tablespoons minced fresh flat-leaf parsley leaves

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Directions
1. Heat the oil in a large cataplana or a pot with a tight-fitting lid over medium-high heat until it shimmers. Dump in the chouriço (or dry-cured Spanish chorizo) and presunto (or Serrano ham, prosciutto) and cook, stirring occasionally, until touched with brown, 6 to 8 minutes.

2. Lower the heat to medium; drop in the onions and bay leaf, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onions are soft, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute more. Stir in the tomatoes and any accumulated juice, the wine, and paprika. Discard any clams that feel heavy (which means they’re full of sand), have broken shells, or don’t close when tapped. Plonk the clams into the pot and turn the heat to high. If using a cataplana, lock it and cook 10 to 12 minutes, shaking occasionally, until the clams open. If using a Dutch oven, cook, covered, stirring occasionally until the clams pop open, 10 to 12 minutes.

3. Carry the cataplana triumphantly to the table, making sure everyone’s watching, then release the lid. Bask in the applause. Discard the bay leaf and toss out any clams that refuse to pop open. Season with a few grinds of pepper, shower with parsley, and ladle the stew into wide shallow bowls. Oh, and have a big bowl on hand for the shells.

Recipe © 2009 David Leite. Photo © 2009 Nuno Correia. All rights reserved.

It’s the unlikeliest of couples. One thin and popular, the other fat and shunned. Each repelled by the other. But when senselessly beaten into a frenzied submission, oh, how they cave! These two frenemies suddenly give in and embrace one other, creating a more perfect union.

Sound like a bad episode of The Marriage Ref? Not surprising. When these culinary opposites—milk and oil—are thrown together, they act a lot like warring spouses, which makes their participation in the creation of Portuguese maionese de leite (may-o-NEZ duh late), or milk mayonnaise, all the more amazing.

I encountered this ghostly white condiment a few years ago in Portugal while trolling the country for recipes for my cookbook. But on our first date I didn’t see it in its shocking bare-naked form. Instead it played the role of a fiendishly good green olive dip at Restaurante A Bolota, in the Alentejo. It was so good, in fact, The One didn’t stand a chance. I singlehandedly mopped up the entire bowl with hunks of bread while he nattered away with the restaurant owner, Antonieta Cocheirnha Tarouca, and the chef, Ilda Vinagre. When he looked at the bowl then at me, I just shrugged.

After dinner I followed Ilda into the kitchen to watch her whip up silky clouds and clouds of white buttercream-y goodness in her processador (food processor) using nothing but milk, oil, garlic, and a few drops of lemon juice. What? No eggs? How could it be called a “mayonnaise” without eggs? By definition mayo is a sacred emulsification of egg yolks and oil, which makes it, at least to me, the mother of all mother sauces. But Ilda shook her head: “Não ovos.” As she scribbled the recipe on the back of an envelope, she explained she wheedled it out of a chef while visiting Brazil. Then she kissed me goodbye and wished me luck.

And luck was certainly what I needed. My every attempt to make a scaled-down version of her restaurant-size mayo recipe ended in a flood of milk with an oil slick on top. Nothing, and I mean nothing, could keep these two together. Ilda, who found the Internet impertinent and cell phones intrusive, was of no immediate help. Eventually I got through to Antonieta who relayed my frantic pleas to the kitchen. The answer that came back changed everything: Don’t make it in a food processor. It’s far too big for such a small batch. Bingo! Once I switched over to a mini-chop, I had thick, luscious milk mayonnaise and green olive dip oozing from GladWare containers on almost every shelf of my fridge.

Fast forward two years.

After the book came out, I was positive milk mayonnaise would be one of its most interesting, most blogged about recipes.  Milk and oil whipped into an emulsion? It defies all logic. Plus it’s eggless. How many people out there have egg allergies? They’ll beat a path to my door and throw their jewels and Google stock certificates at my feet as thanks for releasing them from their mayo-less prison, I told myself. But nothing. That is until months later, when Kathleen Purvis and Amanda Hesser wrote about the recipe within a day of each other. Kathleen hit it out of the park on the first try. It took Amanda four late-night attempts to get it right. (She had strayed from the recipe by using a hand mixer instead of an immersion blender or small blender.) The next day I had my 15 minutes of social-media fame—but not because of anything I did. (Note to self: In order to boost your Twitter clout, allow yourself to be pimped by Amanda, even when she’s exhausted and misreads your recipes.) Questions poured in. Is it really an emulsion or is it just oil-flavored whipped milk (ack! gross)? Can I use cream instead of milk? Is it stable? Can it be flavored?

So I did as I always do when faced with the perplexing conundrums of food science. I called Shirley Corriher, the doyenne of kitchen wizardry and the award-winning author of CookWise and BakeWise.

“Your mayonnaise is a 100-percent, true emulsion,” she assured me over the phone. “It’s not any kind of a flavored aerated milk.” She went on to explain that for any emulsion—mine included—to take hold, one liquid, in this case the milk,  has to break down into finer and finer droplets until it gets “juicy,” or looser, allowing the oil to get all up in there between the droplets to thicken it.

“You also have two other things going for you,” she added. “Milk has natural emulsifiers, making it easier to blend. And the garlic helps to make a sturdier base before adding the oil.” What’s the role of the lemon juice? “It helps coagulate the milk, but there’s not enough to make it curdle,” she said.

Shirley also mentioned that adding a touch of cream would make a better emulsion. Figuring if a little cream is better then a lot must be fantastic, I substituted it for all of the milk and ended up with butter before I even poured in the oil. And for stability? I’ve had my mayos last up to a week with no ill effect (longer, actually, but my publisher’s lawyers would have killed me if I said that in the book).

Last, there’s that pesky question of whether the mayonnaise can be flavored. Clearly, not enough of you are buying the book because in it I offer four variations: cilantro and ginger, anchovy, curry, and sun-dried tomato—which, in my magnanimousness, I’m including below.

The case of the milk mayonnaise that may or may not really be a mayonnaise is closed.

Mayo variations, please? Clockwise from top right: cilantro-ginger, curry, anchovy, sun-dried tomato.

Active time: 5 minutes | Total time: 5 minutes.

Milk Mayonnaise Recipe

Maionese de Leite
David Leite
Makes 1 cup

Since I was given the recipe, I haven’t stopped finding ways to cook with it. The master recipe is only a canvas for additions. Besides the uses in this book, I’ve smeared the variations on grilled meats and fish, used them as dips and in dressings, spread them on sandwiches, and stirred them into potato salads, much as I do with actual mayonnaise.

Atenção: Like all emulsions, this recipe can be a bit finicky. But adding the oil in a thin stream and stopping when the right consistency is reached is the key. For almost foolproof results, a handheld blender is best, but a small canister blender with a narrow base will do.

Directions

Variations
Cilantro and Ginger Mayonnaise
Maionese de Leite com Coentros e Gengibre
Add 1 loosely packed cup of well-dried fresh cilantro leaves and tendril-soft stems and a 1 1/2-inch peeled and grated thumb of fresh ginger to the cup along with the milk, 1 3/4 teaspoons of lemon juice, and the pepper. Omit the garlic. Whir in the oil as directed above. Stir in 1 scallion cut into thin slices on the diagonal.

Anchovy Mayonnaise
Maionese de Leite com Anchovas
Add 6 anchovy fillets (generous 1 tablespoon) packed in oil to the cup along with the milk, lemon juice, garlic, and pepper. Whir in the oil as directed above. Omit the salt.

Curry Mayonnaise
Maionese de Leite com Caril
Add 2 teaspoons of your favorite curry powder to the cup along with the milk, lemon juice, garlic, and pepper. Whir in the oil as directed above. Before using, let this sit for an hour or so in the fridge to bloom.

Tomato Mayonnaise
Maionese de Leite com Tomate
Add 1 1/2 tablespoons of double-concentrate tomato paste to the cup along with the milk, garlic, and pepper. Omit the lemon juice. Whir in the oil as directed above. Stir in 1 tablespoon minced oil-packed sun-dried tomatoes.

David Leite | The New Portuguese Table | Clarkson Potter, 2009 | Makes about 15 wafers

Cookies aren’t exactly a specialty of the Portuguese. The traditional ones tend to be crumbly and plain, more like a dunking biscuit. One day at a dinner party, though, I had a sweet thin cookie with a distinctive snap. I immediately made notes in my ever-present little black book; the only thing is, I never asked the hostess for the recipe. I spent months trying to come up with a cookie that matched hers, and finally I’ve done her proud. But I wanted to ratchet up the recipe, adding two iconic Portuguese flavors to the mix: olive and lemon. Serve these lemon and black olive cookies alone, as a lovely accompaniment to tea, or, my favorite, as a crunchy bite alongside a scoop of vanilla ice cream or lemon sorbet.—David Leite

Atenção: Sample an olive before you buy them. Strong-flavored ones can give a bitter aftertaste to the cookie.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IjnZ2qeToI

convert Ingredients
1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup mild oil-cured black olives, rinsed quickly if particularly salty, pitted, and coarsely chopped
1/4 cup sugar, plus more for coating
1/4 teaspoon baking powder
2 tablespoons grated lemon zest
1/8 teaspoon ground cinnamon
Pinch of kosher salt
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1 large egg, beaten

Want it? Click it.

Directions
1. Position a rack in the upper third of the oven and crank up the heat to 375° F (190°C).

2. Stir together the flour, olives, sugar, baking powder, lemon zest, cinnamon, and salt in a medium bowl. Whisk together the oil and egg, pour the mixture into the dry ingredients, and mix with your hands until the dough no longer looks dry and holds together when squeezed, 1 to 2 minutes.

3. Fill a small bowl with sugar and set nearby. Pinch off 1 rounded tablespoon (about 1 ounce) of dough, roll it into a ball, and coat it well with sugar. Place it in one corner of a sheet of parchment cut to fit your baking sheet, place another piece of parchment on top, and using a rolling pin, roll the ball into a 3 1/2- to 4-inch circle, a scant 1/16 inch thick. The edges will be ragged; that’s how they should be. Repeat with 5 more wafers on the same sheet. Lift off the top sheet and slip the parchment with the cookies onto the baking sheet.

4. Bake until the lemon-olive cookies are edged with brown and pebbled on top, 10 to 12 minutes. Slide the parchment onto a wire cooling rack. Repeat with the remaining dough. Once cooled, the cookies will keep in an airtight container for several days, but I doubt they’ll stick around that long.

Recipe © 2009 David Leite. All rights reserved.