Memories with a Portuguese Flavor

By Jan Pogue - July 19, 2007

Cookbook author Shirley Prada Craig has spent years pursuing a memory.

Her grandmother, simply called vovo (short for vovozinha, Portuguese for grandmother) would toss handfuls of ingredients into a bowl, dump it into a big washtub, and wait for it to rise, then shape the dough into individual loaves of masa sovada, the Portuguese sweet bread that haunts more than one taster’s dreams. Vovo used no recipe, and Ms. Craig, a third generation Islander, remembers her own mother hovering over her stepmother, trying to re-create the bread – five pounds of flour, or six? Two cups of sugar, or three? And why the condensed milk?

No one ever figured out the recipe, but the memory of the sweet treat was too much for Ms. Craig, who with her late husband, mystery writer Philip R. Craig, authored "Delish! The J.W. Jackson Recipes; A Martha’s Vineyard Cookbook” (Vineyard Stories, Oct. 2006, $22.95). She started searching for recipes for the bread, and although she says came up with some good results, admits she failed to get that exact taste,

Shirley confesses wondering, if after all the years, the memory of the flavor is like remembering the snowfalls of childhood, when, she add, "It always seemed deeper than it is now.”

Shirley and Phil, married 49 years before his death in May, put her version of the sweet bread into Delish! — a culmination of years of the cooking and entertaining they did during their marriage. Their book contains more than 250 collected recipes that they kept on file cards in an old library filing drawer on their kitchen counter.

But despite the precision of recipes, the intuitive way of knowing when to throw in another cup or an added teaspoon is largely a product of Shirley’s early years in the close-knit Azorean community of the Vineyard of her childhood. She loved the bread her grandmother made, and today still follows the tradition she learned from her of kissing each loaf as it slides into the oven to bless it. And she loved the "cellar parties” her parents would have every few months, when Portuguese friends piled into the concrete-floored basement of their house in Edgartown (now The Grill on Main Street) for music and fun. There was, she says, "A Zorba the Greek kind of lust for life.”

That lust, along with foods like kale soup, moile crue (a fish sauce) and masa sovada came to the Vineyard in the 1880s, when sailors from the Azores, a group of nine islands off the coast of Portugal, emigrated in search of work. Where the sailors went, their women and families followed, until there was a vital community on the Island that eventually included several hundred families.

The food they brought with them was the oily, garlicky kind found in many Mediterranean countries, heavy on fish and enlivened with pineapple and grapes and other fruits and vegetables. Firmly rooted on the Vineyard, the Azoreans kept some of their dishes but modified others — just as Shirley Craig does three generations later. They also made sure they were passing down the recipes that had always nurtured them.

Shirley’s mother, Genevieve Prada, was a renowned cook on the Vineyard. Born in Fall River, another Portuguese center, "Gen” moved with her father to a farm in Chilmark as a child. In a book written in 1984 by PBS cooking host Joan Nathan called An American Folklife Cookbook, Gen Prada described her life on the Vineyard: "My father killed a pig each year before Thanksgiving. Then he made and smoked his own linguica, the Portuguese smoked sausage. In the fall, we would go haking by moonlight in Menemsha. We would salt-dry the hake as we had learned to do cod. We Portuguese people are survivors.”

Ms. Craig, like her mother, makes a traditional kale soup, although she uses kielbasa, not linguica, and laughingly refers to it as a Polish kale soup. She also makes a seviche (marinated fish salad) from the bluefish she is a master at catching. For many summers, when she was a teacher, her husband a college professor, living in an old fishing camp on one of the ponds, they supplemented their winter salaries by selling her homemade food at the West Tisbury Farmer’s Market: bluefish paté, fresh orange bran muffins and, of course, masa sovada.

When the couple visited the Azores several years ago, they carried with them a letter written to Ms. Craig’s mother from a relative named Aunt Amelia. After finding her Azorean relatives in a tiny community on San Miguel, she meet the woman who wrote the letters for Aunt Amelia almost 50 years earlier.

The embracing hospitality, the language, and of course, the food — were warm reminders of her own upbringing in the Vineyard’s Portuguese community. And she says seeing the land from which her ancestors had emigrated, "made me understand why they came here. They grow grapes, they fish, they farm — just like it was on the Vineyard.”

As always, the couple took away a recipe, this time one her ancestors must have loved: pineapple wrapped in grape leaves and served with fresh goat cheese. And, a few years later, when Shirley’s sister made her own pilgrimage to the Azores, they did, in fact, kill that pig and cook it near the hot springs.

To Mrs. Craig, the circle seems complete – and, if she doesn’t kill the pig and cook it in her backyard, she dreams of the bread that might have accompanied it.

Jan Pogue, along with her husband, John Walter, is the owner/editor of Vineyard Stories.