Better Eggs…
I noticed it at breakfast… Two eggs fried in olive oil. Salt. Bread. A tomato cut in half and left alone. I ate all of it and reached for nothing. There was no bottle on the table and I did not miss it.
For most of my life I put ketchup on eggs. Not occasionally. Always. Steak arrived and I looked for some sauce before I looked at the steak. Fries came and I wanted hot sauce on them, something sharp enough to register. I did not think of this as a preference. I thought of it as how food worked. American food and condiments just go together…
Somewhere in the last stretch of months here that stopped being true for me, but I did not decide it. I never resolved to eat like a Portuguese person. I just stopped asking for ketchup….
The first explanation is the obvious one, and I think it is most of the answer. The food here starts from a higher place. The eggs have yolks the color of a traffic cone and they just taste better, a lot better. Tomatoes smell like tomatoes when you cut them, which is a sentence I would have found embarrassing to write 2 years ago. The fruit and bread go bad fast because nothing was done to it to prevent that. A peach in August has roughly 4 good days and then it is over, and those 4 days are worth the inconvenience of the other 361. I now understand that this is the reason the Mercado da Vila Cascais is open 2 days a week.
When the raw material is this good, the impulse to correct it disappears. Ketchup is a correction. Steak sauce is a correction. Both of them exist because somebody needed to make an average piece of protein taste better, and they work, and there is no shame in that (…or is there…). The thing is that you cannot correct something that is already saying what it wants to say. Put A1 on a picanha that came off the grill with nothing but coarse salt and you have covered the signal with noise.
The seasoning here is confident in a way I did not expect. It is not that the food is bland. It is that the seasoning is doing one thing well rather than several things loudly. Olive oil, salt, garlic, a little parsley, sometimes vinegar. Polvo à lagareiro arrives swimming in oil and studded with garlic and it does not need a single addition, and neither do the potatoes that come with it, smashed and browned and salted. Boiled potatoes with garlic sound like nothing on paper. They are not nothing. They are the argument the cuisine is making and it’s fabulous.
We eat along the Paredão most weeks. Bolina, Supresa, Opiparo, depending on the wind and how far we feel like walking. Whole robalo, split and boned at the table, with olive oil and lemon and almost nothing else. Turbot when it shows up, which is not always, and which is the best fish I have eaten in my life on the days it does. The waiter may bring butter cheese before you have ordered anything, along with bread and olives and sometimes a small dish of tuna paste, and you pay for what you touch. I always reach for the cheese :-). That cheese is a soft, funny, alive thing that spreads like cold butter and tastes like the animal it came from. In the States I would have called it strong. Here it is just cheese.
Away from the water we go to Lamassa, or Santa Rita, or La Hacienda when we want food done properly. The pattern holds in all of them. Very little on the plate. Very little on the table. Salt, olive oil, vinegar, and a small bottle of piri piri that people use with more restraint than i would have in America.
That table setting is the second thing that changed me, and I underrate it less than I used to. In the States the condiment array is a fact of the room. Ketchup, mustard, three hot sauces, ranch, steak sauce at most mediocre places. You do not choose to use them so much as fail to refuse them. They are there, so you reach. Here the default is salt and oil, and the absence of everything else works on you slowly. Nobody told me to stop. The bottles simply were not in front of me for long enough that the reflex went quiet. ..and I do love hot sauce but I think it’s for other psychological reasons.
Culture does that. It resets what normal looks like without asking your permission. I watched people eat fries with salt for several months and now I eat fries with salt.
The third piece is my body, and I say this carefully because I am not a doctor and I am describing one person's experience rather than a finding. Most of what I was putting on my food was sugar, vinegar, emulsifiers, and capsicum. A lot of sugar, in the case of ketchup. When I ate that way I often felt heavy afterward in a way I attributed to the meal rather than to the condiments. I feel different now. Lighter after dinner, mostly, and less inclined to want something sweet at the end of it. Whatever the mechanism, some part of my brain appears to have moved condiments from the required column to the optional column, and once that happens the wanting fades on its own.
The fourth piece is the one I find most interesting. Taste recalibrates. The American flavor profile is loud. Sweet, smoky, spicy, umami, often all at once, and each of those dialed up until the plate is shouting. Live inside that long enough and your threshold rises. You just need more to feel anything. Then you spend a year eating grilled fish and olive oil and garlic and salt, and the threshold falls back down, and the old flavors that used to feel necessary now don’t.
I tried ketchup a few months ago out of curiosity. It tasted like candy. Not bad, exactly. Just wrong, the way a familiar song sounds wrong when you hear it a half step off. Hot sauce tasted like an argument I did not want to have with my eggs.
I do not want to make more of this than it is. I have not become a better person, and I am not going to tell anyone that the Portuguese have solved eating. Plenty of what I love here is unhealthy by any reasonable measure. Bacalhau à brás is potatoes fried in oil bound with egg. The pastéis are pastéis. Nobody in Cascais is eating like a nutritionist.
What changed is narrower than a philosophy. The food I am given now is worth tasting, so I taste it, and the machinery I built to avoid tasting things has disappeared. It required nothing more than better eggs…