A Comfort Food From a Time of Hunger At the Gouveias' family table, as in the rest of Portugal's Alentejo, açorda is king.
Cátia Bruno Roads & Kingdoms; Slate, 3 October 2017 In Reguengos de Monsaraz
Back in the 1940s, when Arnaldo Gouveia was in his 20s, he would leave his home in the village of Motrinos every night at 9 p.m. and walk fives miles to Mourão, where his eight-hour shift at the paper mill began at midnight. Some nights he would arrive at work soaked by rain. Arnaldo, now 90, does not recall those days with nostalgia. "We went through so much pain", he says. His only consolation in those days was the warm, comforting açorda he would eat most evenings before leaving home.
The basic version of açorda (pronounced "uh-soar-duh"), the kind Arnaldo ate as a young man, consists of a coriander and garlic broth fortified with stale bread. The dish has its origins in Portugal's Arab occupation, which lasted from the 8th century to the 13th century. (The name açorda comes from the Arab "ath-thurda", which means "bread soup"). That dish was far simpler than the one I tasted with Arnaldo recently while visiting his son Óscar's home in the village of Reguengos de Monsaraz, seven miles west of Motrinos where Arnaldo grew up. Óscar and his wife, Belmira, a cook in a local hotel, spent a warm summer afternoon preparing an açorda enriched with fish, eggs, potatoes, and bell peppers, served with a side of sliced figs. When Arnaldo was a child, he and his siblings would be lucky to get half a fried sardine each, a luxury forgone by his parents.
"Back in those days, there were no potatoes, nor bell peppers. Sometimes people would even make so-called blind açorda made up only with bread and garlic", explains Belmira. According to local historian Alfredo Saramago, blind açorda referred to a soup in which the olive oil — a readily available ingredient that, for most of the population of Alentejo, was still too expensive to use on a regular basis — wasn't visible.