After two hours at Clérigos yesterday, I was ready to head home but there were some distractions nearby. Namely, a praxe (university freshman initiation rituals) taking place at the base of Clérigos, the reopening of Casa Oriental (more on this later), and a new shop adjacent to it that was unlike any I’ve seen in Porto thus far: a boutique-style eatery dedicated entirely to pastéis de bacalhau (codfish pastries, aka salt cod fritters or salt cod croquettes) called Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau.
That’s a pretty fancy, officious-sounding name, isn’t it? “Portuguese House of the Bacalhau Pastry”–? “Portugal Experience”–?
According to their website, Lisbon has the first location and Porto is the second. I imagine they have plans for expansion — the marketing and logo are set up that way. Some reading confirmed I’m not the only one who questions the claim of “traditional recipe” (with cheese?) and “since 1904”. In fact, there are plenty of articles about it, like this one and this one from June. This place looked very new, and it turns out they set up in Lisbon only on May 4, 2015, despite the vintage-style logo. Except in Lisbon the pastel de bacalhau is paired with beer (the owner also owns the Beer Museum in Lisbon).
Pastéis de bacalhau (or bolinhos de bacalhau) is very common in Portugal. It’s a simple recipe: shredded salted cod, potatoes, onions, parsley, and egg as a binding agent (rather than a flavour). Practically any café that serves up salgados (savoury bites) for lanche (snacks) has these on display, next to chamuças (samosas) and rissóis (rissoles) and croquettes (which are like croquettes everywhere else). Their ubiquitousness is one reason why I found it bizarre that there was a whole fancy shop of them oozing with Serra da Estrela cheese and paired with port wine.
Some mental notes while I watched this lady preparing them in the window:
- I have never seen pastéis de bacalhau filled with cheese before;
- I have never seen any port wine marketed with pastéis de bacalhau before;
- the Serra da Estrela cheese is a major selling point (“land meets the sea”), but it doesn’t make any mention of where the headline ingredient — bacalhau — is from;
- is the pastel a European Union PDO/DOP (Protected Designation of Origin) product? (It is not, but Serra da Estrela cheese is DOP/PDO.)
The whole thing was very curious to me. I can think of at least five places I can reach on foot in a one-minute radius of this shop that sell very tasty pastéis de bacalhau, so how much better could this version be? I went in to take a closer look, and asked permission to take photos.
I balked at the price: €3.50 per pastel, and there were two kinds — cheese, or without. Ouch! I know of places in Porto where I can buy lunch for €3.50! The average-size bolinho (about half the size) will only set you back about one euro or a bit more. But I knew I couldn’t just take pictures without knowing what the food tasted like so I decided to try them both as a takeaway, and they were big enough to share with Paulo to get a second opinion. I didn’t tell him the price until after he tried it, which was hours later, to see if he thought it was worth the €3.50.
I took photos only of the ground floor, but you can see part of the first floor past the chandelier.
Verdict
Taste: I should’ve eaten the cheese one straightaway, because the cheese should be warm. But I still enjoyed it, because I’m already a fan of Serra da Estrela cheese and there’s about 20g of it inside. I also tried a bit of the pastel without cheese, but after eating one with cheese, I could still taste the cheese (I should’ve tried the one without cheese first).
Texture/Size: the pastel de bacalhau is crispy on the outside and soft on the inside, as it should be. But this pastel is quite oversized (120g), considering it’s dense and very rich (fish, potatoes, cheese). The traditional pastel de bacalhau is about half the size or less, shaped more like a dumpling with three sides, and it’s not this smooth and blended, either. Since I’m more of a tapas/petisco-style eater, I prefer the typical smaller size to make room for other petiscos.
Value: I’m on the fence about this since I don’t subscribe to the tactic of super-sizing quantity in order to justify pricing. I think they should cut the size and cut the price. This pastel is really a product to be shared because it’s more than enough for one, but even at its current size I think €3.50 is too steep. But they’re charging what the market will bear, and they’re marketing to tourists who will pay €3.50 to try it.
Here’s a review by a Portuguese couple.
Novelty vs. Tradition
In my opinion, the Portuguese outcry over the use of cheese would be toned down — way down — if this product were marketed as a novelty food with a different name rather than a traditional recipe. That’s my biggest issue, not the overall departure from flavor or texture which would be explained by labelling it a novelty. I said the same thing about Jamie Oliver’s disaster of bacalhau à brás — I don’t care if he’s a (*eyeroll*) celebrity chef, let’s call it what it is: a butchered version of a national dish. My mother-in-law puts his presentation to shame.
It’s also very misleading to plaster the year 1904 around the logo since it suggests the store was established in 1904, when what they’re actually stating is that the traditional recipe is from 1904 — a statement that is also being challenged by the existence of older recipes.
You could argue that this is all “purist” talk, that in a free market anyone can sell anything to anyone willing to pay for it, that recipes get tweaked all the time and dishes are constantly evolving. Sure. But as my nearly-14 year old blog will attest, I’m far from a purist when it comes to food. Fusion cuisine? Bring it on. I have around 600 posts about food and drink. However, I firmly believe food needs to be properly labelled and consumers need to know what they’re eating and — most importantly in Portugal — the history behind it. Can you tell that Casa Portuguesa do Pastel de Bacalhau is less than a year old? The marketing says otherwise. It doesn’t actually have a history itself, so it is claiming one through its version of pastel de bacalhau. It is a bold claim and that’s what stirring up the controversy, even so far as being called “obscene“. That’s a pretty extreme view, but the Portuguese take food seriously. If they didn’t, the food traditions wouldn’t be as strong as they are — especially for bacalhau, which is very traditional and why there are so many different recipes for it. It’s not enough to call them variations; different recipes require different names.
Marketing
Tourists are drawn in by marketing and packaging, and they’ll pay more for a product and accept things simply because they don’t know any better. It happens everywhere. Caveat emptor. Tourist zones around the world are filled with tourist traps, and they will never go away.
However, since tourists come to Portugal BECAUSE of traditions, that it is a selling point for many things, for that reason alone there needs to be a clear distinction between what is traditional and what is not. In this case, the line is very blurry. Some would say it does not matter, that it’s just food. People will like it or they won’t. But it’s more than that: traditions are stories that are passed down from generation to generation. Unless you follow your late grandmother’s recipe to the letter, don’t call it your grandmother’s recipe, put her face and name on it, then sell it for a price that would make her roll over in her grave!
April 6, 2016
Album: Portugal [Spring 2016]