Portuguese Food Quotes

Both commensality, the act of eating together, and the sharing of food are powerful means by which human beings create, express, and solidify feelings of mutual trust, intimacy, and kinship.

In his book The African Slave Trade, Basil Davidson contrasts law and in the Congo in the early 16th century with law in Portugal and England. In those European countries, where the idea of private property was becoming powerful, theft was punishable brutally. In England, even as late as 1740, a child could be hanged for stealing a rag of cotton. But in the Congo, communal life persisted. The idea of private property was a strange one, and thefts were punished with fines or various degrees of servitude. A Congolese leader told of the Portuguese legal codes asked a Portuguese once, teasingly, 'What is the penalty in Portugal for anyone who puts his feet on the ground?

GIVEN A CHOICE between death and the Buford Zippy Mart, Nico would’ve had a tough time deciding. At least he knew his way around the Land of the Dead. Plus the food was fresher. ‘I still don’t get it,’ Coach Hedge muttered as they roamed the centre aisle. ‘They named a whole town after Leo’s table?’ ‘I think the town was here first, Coach,’ Nico said. ‘Huh.’ The coach picked up a box of powdered doughnuts. ‘Maybe you’re right. These look at least a hundred years old. I miss those Portuguese farturas.’ Nico couldn’t think about Portugal without his arms hurting. Across his biceps, the werewolf claw marks were still swollen and red. The store clerk had asked Nico if he’d picked a fight with a bobcat. They bought a first-aid kit, a pad of paper (so Coach Hedge could write more paper aeroplane messages to his wife), some junk food and soda (since the banquet table in Reyna’s new magic tent only provided healthy food and fresh water) and some miscellaneous camping supplies for Coach Hedge’s useless but impressively complicated monster traps.

It's basty!" "There's definitely a soup underneath the crust. I see carrots. Gingko nuts. Mushrooms. And... Shark fin! Simmered until it's falling apart!" Aah! It's all too much! I-I don't care if I burn my mouth... I want to dive in right now! Mm! Mmmm! UWAAAAH! "Incredible! The shark fin melts into a soft wave of warm umami goodness on the tongue... ...with the crispy piecrust providing a delectably crunchy contrast!" "Mmm... this piecrust shows all the signs of the swordsmanship he stole from Eishi Tsukasa too." Instead of melting warm butter to mix into the flour, he grated cold butter into granules and blended them... ... to form small lumps that then became airy layers during the baking, making the crust crispier and lighter. A light, airy crust like that soaks up the broth, making it the perfect complement to this dish! "Judge Ohizumi, what's that "basty" thing you were talking about?" "It's a dish in a certain style of cooking that's preserved for centuries in Nagasaki- Shippoku cuisine." "Shippoku cuisine?" Centuries ago, when Japan was still closed off from the rest of the world, only the island of Dejima in Nagasaki was permitted to trade with the West. There, a new style of cooking that fused Japanese, Chinese and Western foods was born- Shippoku cuisine! One of its signature dishes is Basty, which is a soup covered with a lattice piecrust. *It's widely assumed that Basty originated from the Portuguese word "Pasta."* "Shippoku cuisine is already a hybrid of many vastly different cooking styles, making it a perfect choice for this theme!" "The lattice piecrust is French. Under it is a wonderfully savory Chinese shark fin soup. And the soup's rich chicken broth and the vegetables in it have all been thoroughly infused with powerfully aromatic spices... ... using distinctively Indian spice blends and techniques!" "Hm? Wait a minute. There's more than just shark fin and vegetables in this soup. This looks just like an Italian ravioli! I wonder what's in it? ?!" "Holy crap, look at it stretch!" "What is that?! Mozzarella?! A mochi pouch?!" "Nope! Neither! That's Dondurma. Or as some people call it... ... Turkish ice cream. A major ingredient in Dondurma is salep, a flour made from the root of certain orchids. It gives the dish a thick, sticky texture. The moist chewiness of ravioli pasta melds together with the sticky gumminess of the Dondurma... ... making for an addictively thick and chewy texture!

I do not think so. My experience is that even highly suspicious people will respond if they feel genuinely understood and accepted for what they are. This was Anita’s reaction when she met Nina, the Portuguese girl, and Susan, the therapist. Her body quickly helped her to give up her suspicion by developing an appetite for food when it recognized the true nourishment it had been deprived of. The sincere offer of wanting to understand is very easy to recognize because it resists all pretense. If the person making that offer is genuine, not someone who operates from behind a façade, this will quickly be recognized, even by a suspicious youngster. But there must be no trace of deception in this offer of help.

I think food writing tends to be pompous and, generally speaking, not for the masses. I try to make sure my writing doesn’t come across as pretentious. In fact, my food book, Lisbon in 100 Bites, is quite the opposite of this. It’s about real Portuguese food, in a down-to-earth environment.

There are two kinds of persons which cannot be trusted in this world : the ones who do not greet you with a firm handshake and the ones who do not eat prawn heads.

The Portuguese explorers, astronauts of another time, used these winds and some educated guesswork to push European dominion out of the Mediterranean and into the world beyond. For the mahrineros of Lisbon, it was simple work on most days to sail south to places like Madeira and the Canary Islands, the first non-European stepping-stones of Iberian conquest. Getting home was harder, until someone took a gamble and found that if a sailor put his back to the land and sailed off far enough to the northwest, he might eventually make his way up into westerly winds and back to Portugal before the food ran out. Known to sailors as the volta do mar (return from the sea), this discovery—rather like the splitting of the atom five centuries later—would have irreversible consequences for all that came afterwards. Christopher Columbus used an expanded version of the volta to get his fleet from Spain to America and home again, but credit for a bolder leap goes to Bartolomeu Dias, who tested the concept on a global scale.

…she wanted [her pupils] to know, through their Portuguese class, that the taste of a fruit is in the contact of the fruit with the palate and not in the fruit itself.

Diabetes seemed very much to be a disease of civilization, absent in isolated populations eating their traditional diets and comparatively common among the privileged classes in those nations in which the rich ate European diets: Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Thailand, Tunisia, and the Portuguese island of Madeira, among others.* 29 In China, diabetes was reportedly absent among the poor, but “the rich ones, who eat European food and drink sweet wine, suffer from it fairly often.