Guest post: Carbs, Scarcity, and Other Modern Terrors That Açorda Cures
Resilience is salty and soaked in bread
For today’s free read, I want to introduce you to . Maria is a Portuguese native living in Lisbon and writes beautifully about life, creativity, and culture. Today, she writes about Açorda, a soup from southern Portugal that many will tell you here isn’t just a soup — it’s a symbol of resilience.
You can follow Maria’s work at her two Substacks:
The Everything Creative’s — A community for creatives who no longer bother guessing what they want to be when they grow up.
A-Culturated — how culture shapes the way we think, what we value, create, consume and challenge
Words by Maria Garcia
My cousin recently bought a house in a rural town in Santarém, a city meandering around central Portugal.
It’s a long white house, with high, slanted ceilings, and a red front door with a small square window on it. Farm house chic, if you will. The fact that my 33-year-old cousin could afford to buy this house on her own is cause for celebration — and ample admiration — in a country where that’s becoming increasingly rare.
We’re living through one of the worst housing crises Portugal has seen. Rents are soaring, wages stagnating, and the dream of owning property has become more of a folkloric delusion than a milestone. Many young people are fleeing the country or flocking to rural cities because the big cities have priced them out of their own futures.
Still, this was a languid Saturday of celebration, and as such, we made a meal that combines both heritage and idleness. Of course, it had to include an indulgent amount of bread to arrive at a coma-like state post-lunch. One which the post-lunch espresso only accentuates and does not relieve.
We made a cod-fish Açorda, or Açorda de Bacalhau, as we call it. It’s not a glamorous dish by any means. It’s essentially a bowl of soggy bread, in other words, peasant food, or honest food.
So instead of poping open a bottle of champagne, we tore bits of stale bread into a pot of boiling water. In fact, my cousin messaged me earlier that week excited to make it, because she had lots of leftover bread from Easter.
There’s something powerful about choosing to eat what your ancestors ate when they didn’t have a choice. Especially now, when supermarkets stock over 14 kinds of coffee beans from all over the world but no one you know can afford to buy an apartment.
As I was going through my camera roll, looking for pictures of my açorda creations for this piece, I realized that the last few times I made this dish happened to fall on April 25th.
Not intentionally, but not insignificantly either.
I found it interesting how, without even noticing it, I had been cooking this dish on the day where we (we being the Portuguese) remember what it means to endure. Where we remember the true cost of freedom.
The 25th of April 1974 marks the day that Portugal overthrew nearly five decades of dictatorship. The Carnation Revolution was a bloodless battle where soldiers marched through Lisbon with carnations in their rifle barrels and civilians joined them, chanting.
Every year since, people have walked that same route down Avenida da Liberdade, chanting and spreading carnations through the streets.
“25 de Abril, Sempre,” April 25th, forever.
Freedom isn’t something to take for granted.
I say this, slightly baffled by the recent results of our elections. The far right took a tie in second place, after almost 50 years of it being well in the back burner.
But I digress, I’m not here to talk about politics, though food too, is politics, if we are being honest.
Açorda is a story of survival.
The fact that the concept of this dish has been around since the 10th century speaks for itself. Of course, it wasn’t exactly called açorda then, but the premise was the same.
Like many other Portuguese words, açorda comes from Arabic, in this case meaning tharîd or “crumbled bread”, and this crumbling of bread in a broth is a staple of Arab cuisine. Recipes of tharîd date back to 10th-century Arabic cookbooks. In Fudālat al-Khiwān, a culinary treatise from the 13th century, there’s a chapter dedicated entirely to soups enriched with bread and meats, known as “panades”. Some were sweet, some aphrodisiacs, and others were, quite literally, a meal of survival.
In the centuries that followed, açorda kept evolving. It crept into Portuguese kitchens with the arrival of the Moors, and it remained in our kitchens long before it made it into our cookbooks. In 1680, Arte de Cozinha described how soups must always be served with bread, but these were not yet called açorda. That term would surface later, in João da Mata’sprofessional kitchen manual from 1876, and by the early 20th century, açorda had graduated from something all our grandmothers had been cooking since dawn of time to a regional signature dish.
Today in Portugal, you’ll find plenty of traditional versions of the dish, depending on the region you are in, but the essence remains the same: garlic, coriander, hot water, and olive oil poured over soaked bread, and whatever else is around. The consistency runs from a soup (the Alentejo açorda) to a bread paste (migas in Alentejo), and it can be served as a side dish or a whole dish on its own, with varied recipes from the Douro region, the entire Atlantic coast which uses lots of fish and seafood, Beira and Alentejo with its salted cod, and Alentejo again with pork and sausages.
This dish was meant to stretch scraps into sustenance, and was born in times of hardship. It evolved through centuries of poverty, dictatorship, migration because it asks little and gives a lot. Granted, its endurance owes much to its ease of preparation and to the simple combination of basic pantry ingredients, primarily, bread, which has always been — and still is — a fundamental (and sacred) element of our diet.
The bread is really the pinnacle of this dish. During the truly scarce moments, no fish or poached egg or meat was added. It seems carbs aren’t that scary when your main goal is survival…
We don’t talk enough about resilience in food.
Not in a world obsessed with novelty, fusion, and aesthetics. Funnily enough, the dishes that survive are usually not the most beautiful, but they are certainly the most humble.
Açorda is that kind of dish: unpretentious, resourceful, and marvellously gluttonous.
We currently live in a culture of paradox. We’re surrounded by abundance yet somehow gripped by scarcity. A single blackout (which took out the entirety of Portugal and Spain in late April) had us running for toilet paper as if paper could save us from our own sense of internal deprivation.
We obsess about protein, count macros, and fear bread like it’s the devil, and yet, time and time again, it’s what saves us. Those hearty carbs that keep us going.
We are spoiled by options but sometimes it’s important to return to that which is offered to us. The food that made us past struggles are the ones we return to for comfort for a reason. Resilience is what carries this dish. It resisted the famines and rations and war. It’s endogenous and unpretentious and serves its locals in times of need. It was born out of necessity and evolved into nostalgia, and shaped a part of our culture.
That day, after lunch, we inevitably ended up on the couch in a carb-induced stupor. Good for nothing, and feeling great. There were no plans after that, and no sense of urgency.
In a world that makes us feel like we’re chronically late for something that never arrives, sometimes the most radical thing we can do is stay put and soak old bread in hot broth.
Resilience, it turns out, is salty, and soaked in bread.
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YUM alert!!