Because we live in quite disturbing times, cooking and eating remain a necessary and balancing routine.
Luz Editions shares with you the ideal library of Portuguese cookbooks.
O Livro de Pantagruel — Bertha Rosa-Limpo (1945)
O Livro de Pantagruel (The Pantagruel Book) is undoubtedly one of the most well-known and successful cookbooks in Portugal. The numbers say it all: it has surpassed 75 editions and now brings together more than 5,000 recipes.
Despite a wedding at the age of 15 and a difficult start in her own kitchen, the author ended up embarking on a career in lyrical singing, traveling and discovering a lot of European cuisine.
Bertha Rosa-Limpo compiled an impressive 3,000 recipes that made up the first edition. In them we can discover recipes from Portugal but also from the rest of the world. The author had a special admiration for Italian cuisine, something that ended up driving a national wave of interest for it.
Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa — Maria de Lourdes Modesto (1982)
In 1957, the first regular television broadcasts began in Portugal. The following year, Maria de Lourdes Modesto started her pioneering live cooking program called “Culinária”. It should be noted that the greatest worldwide television hit of live cooking, The French Chef by Julia Child, only debuted in 1963. It was during the 12 years of the television program that Maria de Lourdes Modesto had the ambitious idea of putting together a book that brought together the most authentic and complete traditional Portuguese recipe.
Knowing that this was an arduous task that she would hardly be able to complete on her own, she appealed to all those who had traditional recipes from a certain region to send them by mail. That is how, after 20 years of research and collection, in 1982 was born what Portuguese people consider to be the most indispensable cookery book for any Portuguese home. In it we find a total of 800 recipes that include soups, sausages, cod, açordas, meat, offal and the most typical sweets from north to south covering the Douro, the Minho, passing through the Beiras, Alentejo, Algarve and islands. Note that it is still the most successful cookery book in Portugal today, having sold over 400 thousand copies.
Colecção “Coração, Cabeça e Estômago” — Alfredo Saramago (2001-2004)
Alfredo Saramago was born in the Alentejo, and for that reason he nourished the greatest affection for the cuisine of the region, dedicating several works to him. But not only: he was also a traveler and a great connaisseur of the great European cuisines.
In his book collection “Coração, Cabeça e Estômago” ("Heart, Head and Stomach") he collected recipes and other habits traveling and connecting popular wisdom and oral tradition. He published the recipes and other memories of the cuisine of Alentejo, Algarve, Lisbon, Trás-os-Montes, Minho and Beiras over several volumes.
Dicionário Prático Da Cozinha Portuguesa - Virgílio Nogueiro Gomes (2015)
In this dictionary you will find a wide range of culinary terms, food products, recipes and qualified products - alphabetically ordered and easy to consult -, which will allow you to enrich and improve your gastronomic knowledge.
Each entry shows the definition or identification of a product. Most of the products are identified with the region from which they originate or with the tradition in which their consumption is rooted. There are also some traditional terms from Portuguese-speaking countries that, with some frequency, appear to us as a gastronomic offer.
Lisboeta - Receitas da Cidade Luz de Portugal — Nuno Mendes (2018)
Nuno Mendes is one of our most international chefs. He has been living outside Portugal for 26 years. In Lisboeta, he pours more than 300 pages into his native language. He does so by going to memories and experiences on a journey through national ingredients, where there is no lack of the rusticity of a lard, a black pudding, the cheeses and -of course- the codfish.
Sources: Sapo Viagens blog / Wook