They believe they live atop the lost city of Atlantis. (And Plato’s dialogues would seem to confirm it.) What’s beyond dispute, however, is that they sit on a string of volcanoes whose tremors rattle their windows and frighten their cattle, and whose steamy vents are crucial to the production of a truly remarkable dish.
The people of the Azores have always had to make do. Inhabiting an isolated cluster of islands in the middle of the North Atlantic and separated from Portugal, their ancestral homeland, by some 800 miles of water, they have learned to craft their own wines and cheeses, create impressive dishes around shellfish considered inedible in other parts of the world, and cultivate Europe’s only local tea. They have also learned to cook meals in the bowels of volcanoes.
I first laid eyes on the Azores from the deck of a merchant ship. A young adventurer, I had signed on with the clapped-out rust bucket as a “workaway”—you paid the captain a hundred bucks to work your way to Europe, and at the end of the voyage he either pocketed the money or returned it. This was back when the world was still big and that was a cheap means of getting around it. Because it was January, we were taking the southern route to avoid the gales and ice farther north. Off watch, I was rousted from my sleep by the strains of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons—an apparent favorite of the captain’s— blasting, distorted, from the ship’s loudspeakers. Out on deck, under a near-tropical winter sun, I joined the rest of the crew, who were throwing old oranges and apples to loggerhead turtles diving under the wave created by the ship’s bow. A pair of longboats were chasing a sperm whale lazily breaching in the distance; on the horizon, the peaks of the Azores were visible, poking through an unmoving layer of cloud. Standing on the rolling deck of the ship, I vowed to return one day to those mysterious islands that seemed almost to be clawing their way out of the sea.
And so I’ve come back, years later, to discover for myself what that blanket of cloud concealed.
“This is our exhaust pipe,” says Filipe de Sousa Lima, a local business executive, motioning toward his feet. “Our relief valve.” We are standing in the center of the Furnas volcano, staring at a pool of boiling mud. The walls of the caldera rise steeply on all sides and then disappear into the clouds. A breeze pushes a plume of thick, sulfurous steam over us, and the ground rumbles beneath our feet. I get the sensation that this fragile stratum of the earth’s crust will crack open like ice and send us plummeting into the inferno below.
“Are there earthquakes as well?”
“Nearly every day,” says Filipe. “Some of them we can feel. In fact, word has it there is an underwater volcano building off one of the islands now. We’ve learned to live with risk.”
Just then, the steam clears, exposing some odd-looking holes a few feet wide that have been carved out of the surface. “We use these holes as ovens,” Filipe tells me. “We cook cozido in them.” He has arranged for me to join in the preparation and consumption of this traditional and highly unusual feast, the islands’ claim to culinary fame. As he runs through the dish’s multitude of ingredients, I catch a rich whiff of food; some of these natural ovens, covered by mounds of dirt, are already at work. And there are other volcanic ovens nearby, I later discover, that are not so public.
You have to stoop to get through the front door of Maria Serafina Ventura Canto’s tidy lava-stone house. Set back from the road in the village of Furnas, her home, like the gingerbread structures around it, is built quite solidly upon the thin mantle that separates the center of the earth from the life above it. A frail, stooped woman of indeterminate years, Serafina lives here with her deaf mother-in-law, who when I visit is waiting in a straight-backed chair for her afternoon cup of the local green tea. The house—a cozy place redolent of heady, grandmotherly smells—is a piece of living history. Though Serafina has made a few concessions to the 21st century (she has electricity, and an old black-and-white television sits in the corner), there’s no kitchen in the house. Her kitchen, she tells me, is outside, in the back.
Serafina leads me out of the house and along a cinder path, past an orange tree, two pigs, and a cage of fluttering doves and squawking chickens, to a small shed. Inside, she removes the feed bags lying in a heap on top of some planking and, kicking away the wood, proudly reveals her oven: a three-foot-wide hole in the earth, alive with hissing steam and -bubbling mud. She uses the volcanic vent not only as an oven—with dozens of children and grandchildren in the area, she has plenty of opportunity to prepare her version of cozido—but for nearly everything else a stove could provide. Here, she boils the water for her morning tea and heats the water that she then transfers to a galvanized tub for bathing.
But Filipe has arranged a more upscale cozido for me. The preparation of the ingredients and the feast itself will take place at the stately home of Isabel Medeiros. An elderly woman of aristocratic bearing and sparkling good humor, Isabel plans to use one of the more public ovens, located in the center of the caldera—where no houses stand and where the earth’s crust is at its thinnest. Cozido must be cooked precisely, and she is extremely familiar with the characteristics of those ovens.
While a cozido can be put together by one person, its preparation is often a social affair, involving many pairs of hands. The creators of ours will be Isabel, her sister Lenor, and the wives of Filipe and his brother Pierre. The four women huddle over the ingredients, gabbing cheerfully as they scrub vegetables at ancient brass sinks. Filipe, Pierre, and Isabel’s husband, António, a retired bank director from Lisbon and every bit the Continental aristocrat, sit comfortably in the elegantly appointed living room sipping aguardente, a grappalike aperitif, and discuss Portuguese and island politics.
The ingredients of the cozido reflect the Azorean philosophy of using everything available. The women toss in chicken, pork, veal, the spicy pork sausage called chouriço, cabbage, kale, turnips, yams, carrots, white potatoes, and sea salt. (No garlic, no pepper.) Morcela, a sweet sausage of pig’s blood and various pig parts mixed with onions and cinnamon, is key to the recipe. Consumed on the islands nearly as enthusiastically as fast food in the United States, morcela is essential for the rich, smoky taste it imparts to the stew.
The cooking pot is not, as might be expected, a family heirloom of antique ceramic or brass. Rather, it is made of aluminum. A container made of any other material, says Isabel, would be too thick for the job, and the dish would be ruined.
She lines the bottom and sides of the pot with kale leaves. “This is a ritual,” she says, brushing a strand of gray hair away from her eyes. Her sister stands poised with a thick chunk of veal in one hand and a pig’s ear in the other, as their two friends lean intently toward the pot and offer bits of advice. I marvel at this group effort, at the way these cooks make great skill look like instinct.
Suddenly, Filipe, António, and Pierre enter the kitchen. There seems to be a minor crisis. António takes a flashlight and some string from a drawer, and the three men gather around the pot and stretch the string across the top. Then they disappear into the night.
“They think the pot is too big,” Isabel says with a wink as she packs the food down with her fists. Finally, she and her sister wrap the morcela in cabbage and kale leaves and place the bundles carefully on top of the other ingredients. After tying the lid on tightly with string, the women wrap old bedsheets around the pot and tie them in a Christmas bow. Next, they swaddle the entire package in layers of burlap and then tie up the bundle with a cord that dangles from the table like a leash.
Satisfied, they stand back and admire their achievement. The door bursts open, and the men announce proudly that the pot will fit. “Yes, yes,” Isabel says, uninterested; she’s known all along that it would. Then she unceremoniously pushes the cozido under the table, where it will remain until morning.
At daybreak, a thick fog, sepulchral and ghostly, hugs the ground. The earth down in the mouth of the volcano grumbles; steam shoots out of cracks in the surface, seething and hissing. I wonder again what’s preventing us from falling through to the cauldron below.
Isabel lowers the pot into the ground with a rope. It jams halfway down on its many layers of swathing, so she gives it a no-nonsense kick and it slowly continues its descent. The men shovel dirt onto the wood planking covering the hole, and Isabel, a shadowy silhouette in the swirling steam, looks down at the mound of dirt, still clasping the rope with both hands as if she feared her handiwork might keep sinking and be lost forever.
The Azoreans have cooked cozido in this ingenious manner since the 17th century, and they know to leave the pot in its subterranean chamber of boiling mud and scalding steam for seven hours in the winter and six in the summer.
“And if it is undercooked?” I ask.
“To the pigs!” cries Isabel. “You can’t put it back in the hole. And if you overcook it, it becomes mush and then it, too, goes to the pigs. It is always a surprise.”
Seven hours later, the cooks and their husbands return and gather around the hole for the unveiling. Steam seeps from the pile of dirt, enveloping us in a sweet-scented mist. They lift the pot into the trunk of the car with steel tongs and then drive in solemn procession the few miles back to the house. In the kitchen, the cooks excitedly cut the strings and begin to unwrap the still-steaming bundle of burlap and bedsheets. The men watch in silence. Dirt falls onto the floor, more steam begins to escape, and the smells—sweet, smoky, cabbagey—now become intense enough to taste. Everyone stands over the pot like a proud parent and watches as Isabel lifts the lid with a flourish, prompting a collective “Ahhhh.” The ingredients may have shrunk by a third, but there is obviously enough food to feed a small army.
“We don’t eat it all at once,” Isabel says, standing back and marveling. “It’s what we call roupa velha—old clothes. For us, leftovers are an art. You cook in advance so that you can have other things later.” The recipes for leftovers, she adds, are often more complicated than those for the original dishes.
The long, linen-covered table has been set with crystal, silver, and antique Portuguese china. As the women scurry around the kitchen, the men stand before the fireplace drinking aguardente—not called “firewater” for nothing—and awaiting the feast. The side tables are crowded with the proud vintages of the islands: Curral Atlântis, a Bordeaux-like wine with a deep ruby color and a solid taste befitting the meal; Terras de Lava, a slightly fruity, accommodating white unique to these islands; and the locally made passion-fruit liqueurs. (Because of the -climate and the islands’ rich, volcanic soil, the Azores—particularly nearby Pico—have a long history of producing fine wines.)
The cozido is as tasty as I’d imagined it would be, each ingredient, graced with only a memory of the smoky morcela, remarkably seeming to hold its own. And despite the cabbage, which has been tamed by the items around it, the dish has remarkable finesse. Trying it all, even a piece of the pig’s ear (surprisingly tender), is sheer indulgence.
António, reserved and distinguished, with great sweeping waves of white hair, sits proudly at the head of the table. At the end of the feast, as his guests chatter away, he reaches over, unlocks a cabinet, and pulls out another bottle. Isabel smiles approvingly as her husband pours each of us a glass. He announces modestly that it’s an 80-year-old bottle of Madeira. It is worthy of the occasion, he says, for the cozido is perfect.