English Version | Journey to the origins

I don't know who the genius was who translated the title of Terrence Malick's masterpiece, The Thin Red Line (1998), which the director took from Rudyard Kipling's poem Tommy (and which defines the line of English soldiers drumming at the forefront of battle), into The Invisible Barrier. But it doesn't matter when you're part of a generation that sank into the cinema seat to watch the history of the seventh art take place right there in front of them, redefining the “war movie” genre. Private Witt (Jim Caviezel) deserts his company during what was, during World War II, the start of the American campaign in the Pacific. He is left to live with the indigenous people of Melanesia. The movie is therefore not about the war, desertion or even the Battle of Guadalcanal that follows. It's about a young man who leaves behind, despite all the risks this entails, the lowest condition of man and the vilest sphere of humanity (war) to become part of a world where purity, innocence, indolence and contemplation reign. Nor does time exist in a space where everything refers to paradise in its most biblical definition. Seeing ourselves like this, transported from one extreme to the other, from the darkest perversity to the inculpability of a bunch of children running on the beach or the sweetest candor in the exchange of affection between peers, is perhaps our ultimate purpose. The fact that we don't know this is an essential condition for us to end up here, aimlessly, each more lost than the next, the most dependent on antidepressants ever, popping pills to get us through the next day in a time so far removed from the one when problems of general malaise were solved by eating prunes to regularize the intestinal tract. You don't have to become an ascetic in a Buddhist temple, take a vow of silence and wear an orange robe to know that this life you're living is not. It reminds me of an anecdote told to me by a Spanish friend, which I think is so commonplace chez nuestros hermanos that it's become a reel that I've come across and then let slip. An American tourist asks a local what he does for a living (“what do you do for a living”, as they always ask, and often before “what's your name”). The man replies that he's a fisherman. The other recognizes that it's hard work and asks how many hours he works a day. “Two or three hours,” the man replies. Incredulous, the tourist asks him what he does for the rest of the day. “Well... I get up late, fish for a couple of hours, play a bit with my kids, have a nap with my wife and then go out in the evening with some friends for a few beers.” Indignant, the tourist asks him: “But why don't you work more hours? In two years I'd have a bigger boat, after a while I could open a factory in this village, who knows, maybe it would grow to the point of having other branches in Europe and the United States, with shares listed on the stock exchange, I could become immensely rich.” The poor man asks him “What for?” and the tourist replies “So that when he's 65 or 70 he can come back to this village, get up late, fish for a couple of hours, play with his grandchildren, have a nap with his wife and go out with his friends for a few beers.”We don't want to make too many exaggerations or literalisms, because nobody remembers what breast milk tastes like. Probably just as well. Our first taste memories take us back to very specific flavors, but not always basic ones. When we're still breastfeeding and taste our first soups, then it really clicks. It's seeing the expressions on their little faces (no, they still don't look like their mother or father, let alone their grandfather or a third cousin, your imagination is the fertile one) and, more than that, observing their reactions when a little salt is added to the mix. Yes, we are gourmands at heart and from an early age, demanding customers capable of transforming the bib, table and chair into a work by Jackson Pollock like someone who, in the not too distant future, will call the restaurant manager to complain about the mousse with the egg whites at the bottom. After vegetables, the first fish (it's at this point that we parents become sushi masters, experienced bone detectors) and meat (preferably lamb) are introduced into our diet at a slow pace. I always remember the story that runs in my family about how terrible my sister was to eat. She wouldn't touch milk, nutritious porridge, those jars made by multinationals, nothing. She was wasting away and did little more than sleep. Until my uncle made him an açorda. That's right... with bread, garlic, olive oil and coriander. It was an all-you-can-eat experience. It still lasts to this day. My sis is my favorite visitor, not only because I like her better than Grain Stew, but also because she's the easiest diner to please. Not even the fact that she became allergic to seafood a little over twenty years ago deters her on her tour of the best açordas in Portugal. How I understand her. We shared the same roof for 30 years. Everything was good and better underneath. All around, a wilderness. The eggs came from the neighbors. Everyone had “poultry”, i.e. rabbits and ducks and turkeys in cages and free-range chickens (the ones that laid the eggs). Chicken from the grill? Once every three months because “they're raised with hormones.” The butcher was five kilometers away and we bought little to last a long time in the freezer. Every weekend, a flock of sheep would pass by our street, much to the delight of our dogs, and the shepherdess would bring with her the fresh cheeses we had ordered the week before. The Alentejo roots that spread under the floorboards we all walked on shouted “pork” in a loud voice. And it echoed in the large grills and trays that came out of the oven reheating in a blinding orange from the paprika dough. And bread, lots of bread, that sour, greenish kind that lasted a week, only to end up in my sister's “açordas”. When a health problem struck, making it impossible for my father to work, my mother worked her magic. Green beans grew in the backyard, climbing up cane frames, and potatoes were only a few escudos away. All that was missing was protein. The cheapest possible. My mother's legendary Chicken Wing Garden was born. How can I even miss that? It's possible. Because it was the beginning. And in the beginning was the verb. The verb to eat.

If I blindfolded you and only found you right in the center of the fishing village of Fonte da Telha, you wouldn't believe you were only twenty kilometers from Lisbon. You'd think you were in a place where time stood still. Where, at least, it runs slowly. Too slow when you depend on tides to live. Fonte da Telha was born on the Costa de Caparica, where misery was rife and “loads of lice” were the lesser of evils. In times of great storms, when it was impossible to put the half-moons (a typical boat) out to sea, people would set out on the sand, fifteen kilometers long, to the Albufeira Lagoon, where “there are all the fish in the sea”. They risked much more than just being shot at by the police who guarded the natural sanctuary. In small boats hidden behind the gorse and shrimp and armed with the chichorro (a fine-meshed net, now illegal), they pulled in hauls of sardines, eirós and whatever else there was, the women pulling the hooks in the sand for the clams and cockles. Not infrequently they slept out in the open, hoping that the next day would be just as fruitful, if not more so. About halfway through this journey, during which they picked up the glass buoys, the ingenious flotation “device” that equipped the nets of the Sesimbra fishermen and which washed up on the shore, there was a kind of tavern, home to charnequeiros, alfarinheiros, pexítos (Portuguese for people from Charneca de Caparica, Alfarim and Sesimbra, respectively) and some Maltese, owned by Mr. Camões. It still exists as a restaurant. It was the first “house” on the beach. A fountain that sprang from the cliff, where someone put a tile to access it, was enough for people to flock there from who knows where. Houses were erected and the community was built on the back of a gentle sea that was much more placid than in Caparica. Since then, a lot has changed because vacationers prefer less windy and wilder beaches, but little has changed when summer ends and life goes on as it should. I went to school with those people, they were sick in winter, they were kids full of dreams like me, they ended up doing what their parents and grandparents taught them, not so much out of necessity but more out of passion, a kind of calling that doesn't let a tradition die and leaves me privileged, to go and get cuttlefish and octopus and sea bream and sea bass and rays and sole at a friend's price, which I take home still “gurgling” in the bag, as if it had always been possible to live without the middlemen, call them hypermarkets or “auction entrepreneurs”, who make fish so expensive that nowadays it's more expensive than seafood. And one or two “lances” in the Lagoa (à la da Alagoa, as they say around here) continue to be made under the utmost secrecy. Unfortunately, I can't describe to you what it's like to eat fat, fresh sardines in February. The proof that we are people

inseparable from the sea is also in the person of Marta Pimpão, the successor to her father and grandfather in the production of Ginja Oppidum, the one and only true Ginjinha de Óbidos, harvested in Sobral da Lagoa (in Óbidos) and which until the end of the last century was the only supplier to the establishments in Rua das Portas de Santo Antão. The other day, he was telling me about arrobe. Basically, arrobe is concentrated and boiled must: “In my grandparents' time, and my father's, there was no money for sugar, so arrobe was used.” To this sugar was added a few pears (apple is a modern term, which doesn't fit here), a wild fruit that often grew in backyards in the center and north of the country (today it is cultivated and is of abnormal size, having lost the deep aroma that characterized it) and a sweet was made that he remembers with nostalgia. So much so that he wants to make it again this year, after the harvest. But not until he's done what he loves best: put his father's boat out to sea from Peniche and go to Berlenga and Farilhões. Mr. Pimpão fills the boat with sea bream and sea bass, Marta dives. She's a professional. And a marine biologist. And a shore captain. In the process of becoming a sea captain. In good Portuguese, to be good Portuguese, and to “return to your mother's womb”, as Ary dos Santos would say, you have to be a child of the sea.

Speaking of the grape harvest, the last time I undertook such an ordeal for my (meager) lumbar muscles was in the remote north, between Meda and Penedono. The village is called Ranhados. I mention this because I remember the taste of a mushroom (fradinho) freshly picked and placed on the coals with coarse salt. Or chestnuts. Or the taste of the boiled potatoes that came in the lunchbox in the middle of the day, the saddest thing in gastronomic terms, I thought, until I tasted those, without a drizzle of olive oil, without anything at all, because I had nothing else (and there was plenty to choose from). Or making pomace, tasting it as it dripped from the still, until dawn, engaged in conversations with people who make you rethink your whole life or, at the very least, shuffle and reprioritize and purpose. It seems to me that being down to earth requires us to go back to it. I remember the only time I saw Agostinho da Silva tremendously angry, on his long-awaited television program, with a still bratty Miguel Esteves Cardoso, fresh from the best British universities and full of certainties that he has certainly abandoned today. Our philosopher said to him, with a few grasshoppers already in the mix: “Intellectuals? What intellectuals do you know? Go and talk to the people of deep Portugal, they're the ones who know what life is and what it's made of, not the people you talk to in Lisbon cafés.” Is it possible to live in a metropolis and still be connected to the deepest roots of where we belong? Of course it is. Naples, a city that, in size, puts Lisbon in an armpit, has never allowed the winds of deceptive progress to carry away its essence. From the lifestyle to the products used in its cuisine, which is perhaps the epitome of Mediterranean cuisine, which is itself the pinnacle of World Gastronomy and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, A Neapolitan table continues to see the whole family gathered around its pranzo della domenica for long hours around dishes that have taken many hours to make and have made use of Pomodorini del Piennolo (cherry tomatoes that only grow on the slopes of Vesuvius and are preserved fresh on a stick, the oldest agricultural product in the Campania region), Mozzarella di bufala, Provola affumicata (smoked cheese), fresh pasta made the day before and air-dried and, of course, fish from the Gulf that runs from Naples to the island of Capri and sold at the market or in the streets around the Pignasecca. In Portugal, and due to the many losses that have occurred in recent decades, we may have to be a little more radical. Like chef Hugo Nascimento, who left behind all the Lisbon he enjoyed with Vítor Sobral for over twenty years to find himself living, with his wife and children, between the sea and Ribeira de Seixe, the coastal border between the Alentejo and the Algarve. Could you draw a comparison between his restaurant Näperõn, on the edge of the Atlantic, and El Bulli, on the Gulf of Roses, in the Mediterranean? Only if Hugo was concerned with molecular cuisine as well as the local origin and freshness of the products. Or if, like Ferran Adrià, who one day fell in love with Roses in Catalonia, he had “found” Odeceixe while on family vacations (cooking for friends, of course). Or if Hugo hadn't decided all this because, for him, he'd had enough of Lisbon and needed somewhere to be. Does it require courage to go back to the most basic things that have always guided us as humans? Of course it does. Or maybe it's enough to realize that this life we lead is a war. And yes, lately, it's the world itself that has shown us how difficult it is to find peace. Except we're in Portugal. Let's take advantage of the privilege. While there's still time. 

Translated from the original on Vogue Portugal's Mother Nature issue, published May 2024. Full stories and credits in the print issue.