The Portuguese took it from Brazil to Mozambique and Angola, and it came back to Lisbon as something else entirely
Casa do Frango holds a 4.8 from two thousand eight hundred and thirty people, charges twenty to sixty pounds, and it does one thing.
Chicken. Grilled over charcoal, with piri-piri.
Short menu. Do one thing. It is the finding of five hundred and forty-nine articles and it applies to kitchens exactly as it applies to bars.
The chilli
Piri-piri is not Portuguese and it is not African, originally, and the route it took is the whole story.
Chillies are American. All of them. Every chilli on earth descends from plants domesticated in the Americas, and before 1492 there was not a single one anywhere else in the world.
The Portuguese took them out. They carried them from Brazil to their possessions in Africa – to Mozambique, to Angola – and there the plant went wild and adapted, and it produced a small, extremely hot bird’s eye chilli.
And the Swahili name for it – pili pili, meaning pepper – is what the Portuguese heard and what they wrote down.
And then it came home
Portuguese settlers in Angola and Mozambique developed the dish – chicken, spatchcocked, marinated, grilled hard over charcoal, and basted with a sauce of the chilli, garlic, lemon and oil.
And it came back to Portugal with them, particularly after the wars of independence in the 1970s, when a very large number of Portuguese returned from Africa in a very short period.
So the national dish of Portugal, as far as most of the world is concerned, is an African adaptation of an American plant, brought home by returning colonists within living memory.
It is not old. It is not ancient. It is about fifty years old in its current form and it is one of the great dishes of the world.
What we did to it
We made it a high street chain, and we should be honest that a very large number of British people have never eaten it in any other form.
Which is not a scandal. The chain is fine. But the original is a whole bird, butterflied, over live charcoal, cooked hard so the skin blisters, and served with the sauce on the side rather than sprayed on – and it is a completely different food.
The Prat’s culinary desk regards the difference as roughly that between a doner at two in the morning and an ocakbasi at seven in the evening, and we made that argument at Harana in Notting Hill.
The Algarve
Which is where the restaurant’s version comes from, and where the chicken houses – the churrasqueiras – do nothing else, all day, over charcoal, for people who have driven there specifically.
Verdict
Excellent. A 4.8 across two thousand eight hundred people is a genuinely serious number.
Order a whole bird. Order the sauce hot. Eat it with your hands.
The Columbian exchange
Which is the thing to hold in your head next time somebody talks about traditional cuisine.
Before 1492, there were no chillies in India. No tomatoes in Italy. No potatoes in Ireland. No chocolate anywhere in Europe. No maize in Africa. No vanilla, no peppers, no peanuts.
Every single one of those is American, and every one of them arrived in the last five hundred years – which is nothing.
The food that every one of those countries considers most deeply and defiantly its own is, in very large part, a recent import that somebody’s great-great-grandparents were suspicious of.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
