Traditional Portuguese Cooking

Long before Jamie Oliver became the darling of British food or Julia Child was the most famous culinary presenter on American television, Portuguese cook Maria de Lourdes Modesto was making waves with the most popular live cooking show ever to be shown on national TV and which ruled the airwaves for 12 years (since 1958). Over her prolific career, Maria de Lourdes Modesto has published a number of cookbooks, such as her most acclaimed work – A Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa (Verbo). The result of exhaustive research that lasted over 20 years, this bible of Portuguese cuisine enjoyed the precious assistance of many anonymous contributors who sent in their recipes from all over the country. Maria de Lourdes Modesto respectfully worked on these recipes, studied their origins and tried to establish weights and measurements – no mean Fiat as, in her own words, “precise mathematical formulas have no place in traditional cooking, where creativity and intuition have an important role”. A Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa boasts 800 representative and authentic recipes from all of Portugal’s regions (islands included), and is an fine example of the “Portuguese culinary repertoire”.