Accent on Living

IT’s a pity to mention Portuguese bread without being able to provide a precise recipe for it. All that I have ever elicited from its devotees is the statement, “I don’t really know, but they say you use water instead of milk,” which could be applied to any of the countless nonPortuguese recipes for bread, one supposes, without producing the peculiar chewy crust and the fresh whiff of wheat that make Portuguese white bread so hard on the dieters.

One trouble with bread in town, of course, is that it is often winding up many miles, and many days, away from the bakery of its birth. It seems more the product of the refrigerator than the oven, and the effect of its various preservatives is simply to make it no worse, at the end of a week or so, than it was in the beginning. Portuguese bread, by contrast, should be — and I suspect it usually is — eaten within an hour or two of the baking; not that it won’t keep for a few days but rather because it is so wonderful while even the last hint of oven heat persists. In my own experience, Portuguese bread is to be found, usually in a sizable round loaf, in small bakeries on Cape Cod and “the islands,” and one of the day’s high moments for the summer resident is when word spreads through the waiting customers that the new batch is on sale and, impossibly hot and fragrant in its paper bag, the fresh loaf is sped from the bakery to the luncheon table.

With enough Portuguese bread, a luncheon becomes an all-sandwich, self-serve occasion and just about no work for anybody. Cold cuts, cheese, sliced tomatoes, butter, mayonnaise, perhaps even a few leaves of lettuce (for the food faddists) — a luncheon of this sort of thing backed by fresh Portuguese bread can go on, pleasantly, for hours. Incidentally, an excellent sandwich results from the same bread, sliced fairly thin, spread lightly with mayonnaise, and a filling of watercress and carefully selected flakes of cold halibut or, at a pinch, poached and chilled sole.

If Portuguese bread is a fine thing for the householder, a comparable prize for the restaurant-goer is the white bread served directly from oven to consumer at the Athens Olympia, an old and honored house in downtown Boston specializing in a Middle East cuisine. This is a crustier bread, but its interior is light and delicate. Baked in relays throughout meal hours, it is served at the splitsecond peak of its existence, too hot to handle and too good to resist. The Athens Olympia might escape the notice of the stranger — a dining room undistinguished in appearance and location — but its other offerings, like its bread, are far beyond the powers of what pass for Middle East or Greek restaurants elsewhere, especially its saffron soup, its grillades, and the subtle, complex ad junct to a meat dish that the Athens chooses to call “plain rice.” A great sense of hospitality attends any meal here; one gets the impression that the management and the waiters are just as finicky about the cookery as the most exacting patron would be.

Lacking a recipe for Portuguese bread, I can, nevertheless, offer advice on what ought to be its accompanying dish: Portuguese soup. Together they make a first-rate meal, and the essentials for the soup, as it was served to me by Mrs. Kenneth Bradbury of Provincetown, ought to be available in any large metropolitan market. The main ingredient is linguisa, a highly flavored Portuguese sausage which is so agate-hard in its original condition that the simmering requirement, which you might mistake for a misprint, is altogether correct. The “horticultural” beans were a novelty to me, but my wife had no trouble subsequently in finding them locally, a reddish ovoid bean, cooked and packed in a liquid that becomes part of the soup. The recipe:

1 lb. linguisa, diced into 1/2 inch bits
1 can horticultural beans
1 pkg. frozen turnip greens (if not available, spinach will do)

Simmer the linguisa in a considerable amount of water for a couple of hours, or until it is thoroughly tender. Add frozen greens and last of all add the beans, which are already cooked. Let it all simmer until a fairly thick consistency is reached. It will keep for a day or two in jars in the refrigerator if you wish to make it in advance.

Here is a soup of my wife’s which has been equally well received hot or chilled: zucchini soup, another which can be made a day or two in advance of the occasion. The recipe:

3 lbs. small zucchini
1/4 lb. bacon with rind left on
1 1/2 cans consommé
3 1/2 cups water
1 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. white pepper
1 tsp. monosodium glutamate
1 crushed garlic clove

Wash zucchini thoroughly, remove and discard ends, and cut into small chunks without peeling them. Cut bacon into four or five pieces and simmer all ingredients about one hour or until zucchini is thoroughly tender. Discard bacon and put soup through sieve or puree in blender. Use chilled plates if serving soup cold and garnish each with chopped chives and a small dollop of sour cream. Given a try unexpectedly in the dead of winter, the chilled version of this scores handsomely.