Alentejo Food & Traditional Cuisine

Alentejo cooking is one of the great poverty cuisines, built on bread, olive oil, garlic, coriander and whatever else there was, and it is now regarded as the best regional food in Portugal.

Bread is the foundation rather than an accompaniment. Stale country loaf is soaked, layered or crumbled into dishes as the main ingredient — acordas, migas and sopas are all essentially ways of turning yesterday’s bread into today’s dinner.

Coriander is used with an enthusiasm found nowhere else in Portugal, in quantity and raw.

Porco preto, the black Iberian pig that fattens on acorns in the montado, gives extraordinary meat and cured ham.

Sheep’s cheese from Serpa, Evora and Nisa is set with thistle rather than rennet, which makes it soft, pungent and vegetarian.

And the convent desserts use egg yolk and sugar in large quantities.

Acorda alentejana is the emblem: a bowl of stale bread with garlic, coriander and olive oil pounded in the base, boiling water poured over and a poached egg on top. It was made from nothing, takes five minutes, and at its best is one of the great soups.

Carne de porco a alentejana, pork marinated in paprika paste and fried with clams and coriander — the pig and the sea in one pan, and the region’s most famous dish nationally.

Migas, bread fried with pork fat, garlic and greens into a crisp-edged mass, served with the meat that produced the fat.

Ensopado de borrego, lamb stewed and ladled over slices of bread.

Queijo de Serpa, thistle-set sheep’s cheese, the top cut off and the inside spooned out.

Also: sopa de cacao, dogfish in a coriander and garlic broth; gaspacho alentejano, cold and coarse in summer; and sericaia with an Elvas plum.

Lunch is the main meal, taken between one and three, and the prato do dia at a village tasca — soup, a main, bread, wine and coffee — is the standard and costs very little. Portions are large.

Estremoz Saturday market is the region’s best, spreading across the main square with produce, cheese, pottery, antiques and the clay figurines the town is known for.

Couvert: bread, olives, cheese and paté arrive unasked and are charged for. Sending them back is normal and not rude.

Convent sweets are sold in pastry shops in every town — egg yolk and sugar confections invented in monasteries that used egg whites to starch habits and clarify wine.

Afternoon closure is real in summer; shops shut from one until four or later.

The Alentejo is Portugal’s most commercially successful wine region and the one most Portuguese people actually drink.

It covers eight subregions across the plains, with a warm, dry climate that gives ripe, generous, soft-tannined reds that are approachable young. The grapes are almost all local: Aragonez (Tempranillo), Trincadeira, Alicante Bouschet — which ripens superbly here and has effectively become the region’s signature — and Castelao, with Antao Vaz, Arinto and Roupeiro for whites.

Talha wine is the region’s remarkable survival: wine fermented and aged in large clay amphorae buried or standing in a cellar, a Roman technique practised continuously in villages around Vidigueira and Vila de Frades for two thousand years. The talhas are tapped from a spigot near the base, and the wine is traditionally drunk from Saint Martin’s day in November. Several producers now bottle it, and it tastes like nothing else.

Estates around Reguengos, Borba, Portalegre and Vidigueira are open to visitors, and Portalegre’s high-altitude old vineyards make the region’s most elegant wines.