The Search for the Best Pork in Portugal
A culinary pilgrimage leads to a secret brotherhood devoted to leitão — suckling pig roasted to crispy perfection.
By Jack Hitt
Photographs by Maciek Pozoga
Tiles by Gazete Azulejos and Tiago de Oliveira
Way north of Lisbon is an isolated village that I heard about, the way you do, from the mother of a colleague of my wife. Aguada de Cima, she told me, was the remote El Dorado of pork, where one could encounter the tradition of fire-roasting suckling pigs to perfection — low-smoked meat and blazed crispy skin.
Some years earlier I had learned about, and even visited, the town’s surrounding region, because it’s well known that almost everyone there is involved in raising pigs, cooking them, eating them. All pigs, all the time, the signature dish being leitão, a small milk-fed piglet roasted whole on a spear over a hot fire. Most tourists, whether foreigners like myself or just Portuguese visitors from other provinces, hear that Mealhada — a town ten miles south — is the center of pork eating in the region. And Mealhada knows it. The entire local highway is lined with restaurants — Floresta dos Leitões, Pedro dos Leitões, Pic-Nic dos Leitões — some with giant, absurd signs, like a smiling porky laughing from a plate. They seat hundreds of people every day, and one local expert boasted that the restaurants in the area cooked 15 tons of leitão a day. But when I visited, I found it overwhelming, and in the end, I preferred the chanfana (goat stew) to the pig meat, which was just way too fatty.
My pig judgment and obsession run deep. I grew up in the southeastern United States, where cooking whole hog barbecue is just something that most of us pick up along the way. And if you spend any time around a whole hog pit, then you know that pulled pork cooks at a very low temperature but crispy skin can only happen in a blast furnace, so pulling off both is a culinary impossibility. I attended a cooking festival in Oxford, Mississippi, and watched pitmaster Ed Mitchell cook a whole hog overnight, and the next morning there was a perfectly blistered pigskin packed with pork. It was a thing of beauty. But of course, he had slow-cooked the pork, pulled the meat out, boned the thing, ramped up his oven to 600 degrees, and hardened the whole half pigskin into a silhouette shell before loading it up like a tray. Very cool, but still, a trick. What these leitão places in this region of Portugal promised was a pig-cooking paradox, and the dream.
So it was hard to resist when my wife’s colleague’s mother wrote to tell me that Aguada de Cima was “one of the probable places of the origin of the piglets tradition.” It was a place so small that a single family dominated the leitão trade and maintained the old style of cooking. Maybe here was the place to encounter the best of this pig dish. So I hopped on a plane, rented a car, and drove myself to this outpost outside the leitão-industrial complex. The village didn’t sound to me so much like a place as some religion’s description of a soul’s final destination.
Aguada de Cima is little more than a roundabout nestled on a long winding road in the north of Portugal. Nearly every building is white or pink stucco with a weathered terra-cotta-tile roof, and there’s no sign that the outside world — a Gap or a Starbucks or a McDonald’s — has bothered to make a beachhead here. There’s a café, a pharmacy, a church, a pastry shop, and not much else. Well, there’s Restaurante Casa Vidal, where I was trying to go. Still, I couldn’t find the place and stopped at the roundabout for coffee and directions. Can’t miss it, a lady told me, just stay on the Street of Souls.
I was headed not just to eat pig at Casa Vidal but to meet Miguel Castanheira, a serious pig devotee who’d be my Virgil into this rural hamlet.
Castanheira is an accountant in the nearby big city of Coimbra, but he lives in town and happens to be the president of a local brotherhood exclusively devoted to maintaining the ancient pig-cooking arts, a mission accomplished in long brown-hooded robes reminiscent of a medieval monastic order auditioning for a Dan Brown novel. The brotherhood also maintains rituals that date all the way back to a time that can’t quite be confirmed, and wear intricate necklaces and medallions suggestive of esoteric mysteries. So let’s just say Castanheira takes his pig very, very seriously. When I contacted him by email, he’d suggested that, if I wanted to taste this exquisite dish and maybe even learn its cryptic secrets, we should meet at the polestar of all leitão cookery, Restaurante Casa Vidal, in town — can’t miss it.
The tradition of cooking wee little pigs in Portugal dates back more than three centuries and was perfected, as far as anyone knows, at an early-winter moment in the grape-harvest calendar when the vines are pruned. The fragrant branches were used to fire the oven. It took half a day to cook leitão, so cooking one was a big deal, a time-consuming bother, and it was eaten only on various holy days or special occasions. How to cook one was sacred knowledge passed down through generations, while various family members tended to the fire. Then, half a century ago, one local family, the Ferreiras, opened a restaurant in Aguada de Cima and made this one feast dish available in the village every day of the year. It has since become a hidden gem among pig aficionados, a favored spot for lunch meetings and nighttime family gatherings.
The establishment looks just like a house, quietly situated on the edge of town beside a large copse of trees — easily missed, I might add. Inside, I met Castanheira, a tall and handsome man sporting a pair of mod-’60s European specs. “My favorite is the tail, but it’s not the favorite of most people,” he said by way of introduction. He was pretty excited and wasted no time with chitchat. “Most people fight over the ribs.” Castanheira likes the ribs, of course, but also the legs, he confided. He reminded me of a book editor who once told me he liked a strong beginning to a good story, but also a killer ending and good development along the way. A few minutes later, Castanheira said, “I like the ears and the brains for the taste.” I should have asked him about the oink.
More than half a century ago, a man named Vidal Dias Ferreira — the father of the restaurant’s current proprietor, José — started to make a little money cooking chicken and other small dishes at the weekend market that happened regularly in Aguada de Cima. Occasionally, someone would ask him to cook leitão, so he found himself cooking two or three of them every week. Even though there was a local who already cooked leitão, somehow Vidal’s became the preferred version. He opened this restaurant in 1964, and now José, who took over after Vidal’s passing ten years ago, cooks a few dozen each day. Another son, Agostinho, runs a private leitão catering business just up the street, and also cooks his piglets according to dad’s tried-and-true practices.
Hearing Castanheira attempt to describe the various techniques reminded me of listening to pitmasters talk about whole hog. The cooking isn’t all that difficult, but there are many ways things can go wrong, undercooking one part and scorching another. Great leitão is another of those group foods with no single chef as the author, but instead the brilliant collaboration of many generations of anonymous cooks and nameless ancestors learning lessons and fine-tuning the process to perfection. The Ferreiras are the caretakers of this accumulated wisdom, and when our piglet arrived at the table, I understood why.
It was, according to tradition, cut into perfect bite-size squares. The chef had held back on the pig head, but I insisted, and out it came. No need to be squeamish, and in the era of thoughtful eating, I wasn’t interested in throwing away a bite. All consumption of meat unavoidably arrives these days in a simmering debate about sustainability, cruelty, local sourcing, food waste, methane, and climate change. My own way of struggling with all of these issues is to eat a lot less meat and way more vegetables. The first step in that plan has always been to restrict my carnivorism and indulge occasionally in extraordinary cuts of local meat. Leitão more than qualified. Each tiny square was astonishing — paper-thin crispy skin holding just enough smoky tender meat, with a thin line of just enough tasty fat on a small bone.
“You need to take a little bit of orange with each bite,” Castanheira instructed. The surrounding sides made the meal. In addition to the orange, there were boiled potatoes and a very green leafy salad. Oh, and also something I had never even heard of — a sparkling red wine, light and bubbly, made with local Baga grapes. Agostinho has his own label: Quinta da Pedreira. The phalanx of sides and wine countered the pork fat in the best way, making the smoky flavor of the lard-infused meat stand right up.
With Castanheira’s intervention, the restaurant’s proprietor, José, a dashing man who’d pass for Michael Sheen (mop of untamed hair included), agreed to show me the whole works and tell me about the chef’s secrets — all the incremental hidden tweaks and touches that had been honed over the generations. After we’d plowed through our meat, he led us through a series of rooms, all the way to the very last indoor enclosure, where I met the next dozen meals milling around in a clean pen. Most were pink, but some were piebald. And they all had the floppy ears of the local breed, Bísaro.
The importance of the Bísaro is not just the pride of it being raised locally, I learned, but also that the piglets’ bodies tend to be longer, which means there’s more of the favored rib meat. On the way back to his ovens, José explained that the killing is done with total immediacy — the pigs are electrocuted — and that this too is important. “A pig this small will lose about 30 percent of its body weight in a refrigerator,” José said, and so a typical leitão at his place is dressed and ready for the oven within a half hour of leaving the pen. The piglet is gutted, rubbed with a homemade concoction — salt, pepper, garlic, and lard, José told me — and speared on a bastão. In bygone times, the bastão was a stiff, straight branch of laurel wood. These days, one accommodation to the tiled hygiene of a restaurant like this is a clean stainless-steel pike. After about two and a half hours in the oven, out the pig comes, the skin crisped a perfect brown. The final step is to tilt up the hindquarters so that a liquid mix of spices and fat comes from the mouth, all of which goes into the next batch of what is now a rich, warm sauce.
This rub José seemed to take some pride in, and right away it reminded me of back home, whenever I’m visiting some friend who’s smoking a whole hog. Ask any pitmaster about the secret of their barbecue sauce and they get downright paranoid when you start poking around. Pretty soon you will receive some grand pronouncement that they have a mystery ingredient about which they will never tell you. And yet, another shot of bourbon and suddenly you are finding out that secret ingredient after all, and it’s always something hilariously not mysterious. A half cup of cold coffee, a chunk of chocolate, or a glob of mustard. Secret-ingredient talk has always struck me as just so much male chest-bumping and chef BS, but maybe that’s just because it’s difficult to explain how a good thing comes out that way.
I told José as much, and he just let loose a guffaw, insisting that, oh, yes, he had a secret ingredient. Then, at my cajoling, he gave me “bay leaves,” but just watching him work made it clear that the technique to cooking suckling pig is not that different from whole hog. The secret is confidence in your oven. And looking at José’s, which Castanheira deemed “the Ferrari of ovens,” I realized why leitão could only work with baby pigs. It’s really almost a kiln when the pig goes in: The first thing that happens is the skin is immediately hit with that perfect temperature, and it seals up. The pig is small enough that, after two to three hours inside, as the skin crisps to a caramel brown, the smoky heat dissolves the fat right into the flesh. It wouldn’t work with a larger pig. It couldn’t. By the time all the meat was cooked, the skin would be a carbon chip.
We were standing in the big oven area learning about proper pig weight when José’s mother, Maria, came in. Like so many tiny old ladies I have known, her entrance alone claimed all the available space of authority in the room. Dressed in slim black slacks and a white chef’s blouse with a pig embroidered over the pocket, she stood erect with her barely five-foot self in a way that seemed to tower over the room. José practically bowed backward. Actually, we all did. There are certain elders whose very presence forces you to assume the posture of a medieval peasant suddenly gazing upon Her Majesty.
Jumping into our discussion of proper piglet weight, Maria stated “Four to six kilos” with all the authority of the Pope speaking from a balcony. She went on to explain that the piglet should be weaned off the mother’s pure milk and onto vegetables. It’s agreed that the piglet is better if it “starts eating something more substantial, because that goes to the meat.” When she departed, a handful of restaurant workers scuttled after her like a regal cortege.
The biggest leitão event of the year happens the first Saturday after Easter, when the town gives itself over to a week of parties, the village’s centuries-old religious feast honoring the saints. There’s a full Catholic mass at a small chapel in the center of town, and then a parade where half a dozen strong men carry a bier bearing a life-size image of Christ carrying a cross, and then another of a life-size Christ on the cross, and the Virgin and a few saints thrown in. There are bands and marches. Meals and concerts. Roadside food of every description, and nowadays, a lot more leitão.
After lunch we headed down the street to tour a private museum devoted to the history of the leitão brotherhood, which takes part in the festival. Its male members wear hooded brown monks’ robes; the women wear collared robes with matching fedoras. Only in an extremely Catholic country could Castanheira get away with telling me with a straight face, “It’s not really religious.” He means it, though.
It formed in 2002. Castanheira explained that Portugal had suffered through decades of a stagnant economy, and then, around the turn of the millennium, things changed. “When we got a bit more wealthy, people started to come to Aguada de Cima to see what we manufactured,” he said. “We were making doorknobs and hinges. And people started going to restaurants, and food became important.” Actually, he said, that was happening everywhere — “there was a movement in Portugal of creating brotherhoods.”
More of a tectonic shift. I found out about dozens of these clubs, these confrarias, each of them linked to a given town or region — and most of them based around food. They honor the obvious, of course. There’s a Confraria Gastronómica do Bacalhau, of cod. That goat stew from Mealhada I loved? There’s the Confraria da Chanfana. But there’s also a brotherhood of angel cake, sheep’s cheese, stone soup, anything from the sea, a marmalade candy, tripe, a rice dish, and “chicken of the field” (essentially a free-range chicken). Each fraternity was formed locally to exalt a local specialty and gin up a reason for locals to celebrate in a way that might attract more people to visit.
Perhaps my favorite is the Confraria da Foda Pias-Monção, which commemorates a lamb and rice dish in the village of Pias in the municipality of Monção that is named after a famous incident that’s become town lore. The story goes that the locals got snookered by some shepherds who fed their sheep heavily salted food the night before the market, and the locals bought these water-bloated animals by weight and paid a fortune. A few days later, when the sheep lost all those kilos, one local realized the trick. According to one account, the guy exclaimed, “Que foda!” — literally, “What the fuck!” And thus the lamb dish got its name. So, maybe in the naming department, the grammatical clunkiness of the “Confraternity of Holy Souls and Milk-Fed Pigs” is the envy of the guys over at the “Confraternity of What the Fuck Pias-Monção.”
It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of this new food religion in Portugal, or in this little town. Right outside Castanheira’s museum, we met the president of the village junta, the mayor, essentially, who was ecstatic that an outsider was in town to write about leitão. He insisted that we visit the parish church of Aguada de Cima and another tiny one-room museum of the village, just around the corner. He jumped on his cell phone to summon the correct people, and soon every door on the little town square was open.
Inside the museum, a couple of giant tablets spell out the place’s history, dating all the way back to when the Roman-founded village of Aqualata was known for its ville crescimiris and rivulo frigido, its “bountiful farms” and “cold waters.” Right in its name is the centrality of the fresh waters here, and the abundant harvest. The history of good food, it seems, was always the draw of the place. And next door inside the church was the literal juxtaposition of Portugal’s past and present. The back half is fully modernized, with brand-new seats and plaster walls with fluorescent lights, and in the front, a wood-carved altar three centuries old, resplendent with painted biblical images and an immoderate fondness for putti, and those little baby cherubs, all life-size, dozens of them erupting from the wood, each outsize head wearing the oddly knowing grin of an adult.
All afternoon, as we walked around the small plaza, Castanheira continued to insist that there was nothing religious about his brotherhood. Their mission was purely about the miracle of food. And by then it wasn’t so hard to see how that was true, how in the slow gyre of a thousand years, little Aguada de Cima’s religious traditions grew up, like in so many villages, around the miraculous harvest in a blessed location. But now the central influence of religion has waned, and the hooded fraternity has reclaimed food’s central meaning in the village.
In some ways, that claim can be made about all of Portugal as it has emerged from generations of suppression and economic decline. Reclaiming the nation’s culinary traditions has been key to this transformation. There are hundreds of these food parades all over Portugal every year, and some representative group of Castanheira’s roughly 40 or so members attends as many as 100 of them. Castanheira said that, since he’s the president, he personally goes to about 25 each year. Food is arguably the central organizing principle of the secular Portugal that has emerged in the era of the European Union.
A few days later, we were invited to the other Ferreira son’s house. Agostinho runs a catering business, and the back end of his house is dedicated to pig, complete with customized leitão ovens and stacks of pine branches for the fire. If his brother serves a standard restaurant crowd, then Agostinho aims at much larger crowds — a family reunion, a company party, a small celebration — that gather in the back of his house, where a roomy dining area opens onto a huge yard.
This party was no different. Agostinho had his wife and daughter at the table, Castanheira brought his family, and I brought mine as well as guests. The place is decorated like a giant family den — if your family den was devoted to cooking pigs. Framed newspaper articles extolled Agostinho’s talents, old unused wine barrels were stacked against a wall, clay pigs were displayed here and there. Castanheira whispered to me that maybe it would be best not to mention that we’d already dined at the brother’s restaurant. I tried to find out why. Tensions in Aguada de Cima! Family drama! But then Agostinho’s wife set down a stew called cabidela, made of the piglet’s roasted internal organs — heart, lung, liver — which was rich and fabulous, and I forgot all about any sort of conflict. Castanheira brought me in and said, confidentially, that, truth be told, cabidela might be his favorite part.
Soon enough, the full leitão appeared, cooked to paper-thin skin-moist tasty-meat sublimity, and Agostinho’s daughter came out to cut the pig for us. Short and peppy, Mariana is a young woman in her late 20s. She pulled out a serious pair of pruning shears and warned “I sharpened them myself” before turning the entire pig into an exact replica of itself on the platter, only in perfect bite-size squares.
As is custom, she had learned the art of cooking leitão from her dad. When I steered the conversation to the issue of Great Secrets, she slyly said that her father made it perfectly and she made it precisely like him, down to the rub.
She represents the next generation of her town’s leitão dynasty: She speaks English and maintains a vivid social media presence. Just last year, Manhã CM — essentially the Today show for all of Portugal — did a spot on the region’s famous piglets. Mariana was the person sent to speak for leitão and stand beside the renowned host, a TV celebrity known simply as Maya. There were tall, stately men on stage, too, experts who guzzled sparkling wine and pontificated on tradition and custom. But Maya eventually centered the piece on Mariana, clad in a full chef’s outfit with her shears at the ready. The camera pushed in for a close-up of Mariana Scissorhands at work, turning a whole piglet into a plated delicacy in a matter of seconds. She wasn’t there as just a pretty face, but maybe because she knows that the secret ingredient to great leitão, for the next generation, is showmanship.
About the author: Jack Hitt is a writer whose work has been anthologized in Best Food Writing 2014 and Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing. He also teaches every year at the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship at UC-Berkeley.
