Alentejo

An Alentejo table is built on what the land gives — wheat, cork-oak acorns (which feed the black pigs), wild herbs, and very little else. The Alentejano eats bread at every meal, and stale bread doesn't get thrown out: it becomes açorda (soaked in garlic-cilantro broth) or migas (sautéed with pork fat and garlic), or the base for sopa alentejana with a poached egg dropped in. The local cilantro — uniquely Portuguese in its mainland use — perfumes everything. Sundays bring black pork (the same Iberian acorn-fed animal as Spanish jamón) over charcoal, or a slow-roasted leg of lamb in white wine.

Within Portugal's regional kitchens, the Alentejo is the great inland south — wheat plains stretching from the Spanish border to the Atlantic, cork-oak savanna (montado) where black pigs roam, and rural households that taught Portugal frugality. The convent kitchens of Évora and Beja used egg whites for textile starch and wine clarification, leaving piles of yolks; the resulting catalog of egg-yolk sweets (encharcada, sericaia, queijinhos do céu) is one of the deepest dessert traditions in Europe.