At Table with Portugal: Novo-richism
Christmas, always given to excess, does not let us think about food. And thankfully, fasting doesn’t have to be a drama, sometimes it can even be prophylactic. Let’s see.
Abundance corrupts our hunger and stops us from looking empty and answering blaisily “I don’t know what I feel like”, as if eating were a state of mind on the verge of depression. I have been thinking about this a lot. Perhaps we are deceiving the taste with abundance, not feeling the taste of food or recipes just because we always have it available and in large quantities.
Perhaps, one of the principles for us to taste more and better is to let it enter our daily lives. I don’t say hunger that “kills us from hunger”, but I say a rule that doesn’t let us eat out of habit or because it’s necessary to fill the lunch or dinner time with food.
How can you select a Chanfana if the previous meal was a Cozido? How do you taste a Margaride sponge cake if you have a Portalegre Candy first? The truth is that collecting meals, in addition to causing the stomach to dilate, inhibit our ability to taste. We continue to eat, but we can no longer taste it. Maybe that’s why I don’t have great sympathy for competitions involving gastronomy. After all, how to score when the palate is already numb with so much evidence?
Perhaps the difference is between tasting and eating. It seems to me that we eat more than we taste. Or, we swallow more than anything else. We can put many adjectives in the food, we can fill it with “stories”, but we have to do so that the flavor is not lost in the midst of so much abundance. There is no palate that can resist such an overlapping of flavors.
In the kitchen, simplicity has always won. It is enough to look at the history of the recipe to understand that the exaggerated and rococo sophistication was short-lived. What happened to medieval recipes that were soaked in “composts” and “smelling herbs”? They were being peeled like an onion and only the essentials remained.
In a kind of gastronomic novelty (which is repeated and cyclical in history, it is true) we always have everything without regard to common sense and moderation. Of course, it has always been acceptable to have plenty at festive times. A sort of liberating effect from the work routine, the party was always one of ecstatic food. But calm down. We don’t need to die of thirst at the well. We don’t need to kill off the taste in abundance every day of the week, every week, every month. We can accept frugality as a benefit, as a need to oxygenate the palate, to let it breathe until the new fortuitous, passionate and liberating encounter with food. The one we don’t want to lose sight of, the one we want on our table and, therefore, we choose well.
Starvation doesn’t have to be a punishment, nor food a sacrilege. It will be, yes, sacrilegious not to taste the way it deserves. After all, why were our ancestors fighting? Cloth for sleeves this conversation.