Well, they say absence makes the heart grow fonder. After a long hiatus involving writing a thesis on homesickness in immigrant communities, springtime pantomimes, waving a tearful adieu to Paris, and transporting my batterie de cuisine back across the channel in a 3-wheeled removals van, Rosbif and Frog’s Legs has packed a case full of summer frocks and is summering in Lisbon.
Ah, to be a tourist in a new city! Two blissful weeks have been whiled away drinking Sagres by the sea, climbing the Seven Hills, slipping on eroded cobblestones and being driven to despair by vuvuzelas. As the old diktat goes: Fado, fátima e futebol. In the street, the scent of the sea mingles with that of sardines smoking on rusty grills, and weathered-faced men sit on doorsteps and drink themselves into a silent stupor in the midday heat. Come night time, the men are starting to sway, and now the scent of the sea does nothing to mask the nauseating stench of a thousand sardine skeletons rotting in black binliners. Sleep is further hindered by the constant flow of hysterical wails and yelps coming from the fado bar downstairs. I always did prefer Spanish soleas.
Lack of sleep is a small price to pay, though, for a new larder. Gone are the piping bags and pastel colours (for the month of July, at least). Cooking in Portugal is cooking with balls. And lungs, spleen, tripe, and all the other typical markers of a national cuisine bred from a history of poverty. Indeed, Portugal remains the poorest country in Western Europe. And Lisbon, though surely the most cosmopolitan city in the country, still has a cuisine with its roots in the countryside. At the market, headless chickens are strung up next to fluffy bunnies with bloody noses. Beaming, wrinkled old women proffer up bruised peaches; flies swarm around a single crate of shockingly rotten figs. This is not Paris. Pas du tout.
What does gleam though, as much as any Cartier shopfront, is the fish. Hundreds of glass eyes stare up from gleaming piles of silver; tentacles dribble ozone slime down the legs of any passer-by. Barnacle-encrusted crabs die slowly, sadly blowing bubbles while waiting to be boiled alive. There are sacks of clams, cockles and tiny snails, and sheets of bacalhau – dried salt cod – are arranged by price and quality.
On the way home, a couple who must surely be in their eighties are camped out in the square. He is wearing a scuffed cap that reads “Força Portugal” (even though Cristiano and his team were sent packing from South Africa several days ago), she is all in black. The gimicky cap aside, this could be a scene from any of the past twenty decades. A sign at their feet reads: “Mangerição – para o amor”. Basil - for love.
As achingly, viscerally, romantically Latin as all this may seem, nothing can get away from the fact that sweating profusely in the bone-dry 41-degree heat of the day (barely abating at night); change after change of damp clothes; putrid rubbish bags; howling fadistas and - worst of all - raucously, selfishly merry American teenagers on a European “culture” holiday, sap the appetite like nothing else.
Drippingly ripe peaches, fish stiff from the sea, melons with their stalks on, pasteís de Belém…and all I want to eat is ice cubes.
