Of Cake Sampling and Related Problems

It was time to take another step in my quest to find the perfect bolo de bolacha. However, it was a step I hadn’t planned to take.

We’d all but spun a coin to decide where to have Sunday lunch: would we choose one of the restaurants that was part of the local gastronomy weekend or would we go somewhere that hadn’t signed up for the municipal shindig? In the end we chose a place we’d never been to before but which was conveniently located near where we had some Sunday morning business to take care of. The restaurant was one of the entrants for the Fim de Semana Gastronómico.

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Well, that’s what it said on the municipal website, but when we enquired about the menu not a single item on the festival list was mentioned. To be honest, that information did not cause us any heartache. We munched our way through some top class entradas (all non-festival) while deciding that their offer of bacalhau com broa was too good an opportunity to pass up, so that’s what we had. A good choice it was too – the crumbly fresh broa that coated the fish was flavoured with just the right amount of garlic and the result was a total delight, the kind of delight that requires silence while you savour it to the full.

The restaurant was full, as indeed it should have been. That doesn’t lead to savouring in silence and, if anything, the tables were a tad too close together for my liking (which,in the end, was my only criticism of the place and of the meal). As a result, the complex reactions between garlicky broa and perfectly cooked bacalhau had to be assimilated to a background chorus of mixed voices. In among the hubbub of voices, it was impossible not to notice that the table of five to one side were playing a very interesting version of the Tower of Babel. Of the group, it appeared that one of them could only speak French, one could only speak English and three were Portuguese. Of the Portuguese, one spoke English quite well but no French, another of them could speak French but no English while the other could speak neither French nor English. Nevertheless, language flowed and laughter rippled and various apps on phones helped out from time to time and they found a way to keep everyone involved. This was in contrast to the couple sitting on the other side, who said not a word to each other during the whole of their three course meal. Perhaps their entire experience was too good to be interrupted by mere words. Perhaps.

Then came the bolo de bolacha moment. I’ve been conducting this rigorous survey for a number of years though I am the first to admit that I don’t have any criteria as to what constitutes a good bolo and what doesn’t. But, I surmise, if some people can run an entire country without a clue as to what they are doing, why can’t I sample sobremesas using the same criteria? The thing about this kind of survey is that you immediately know if you don’t think a sample is up to scratch but you can’t always articulate why that is. Too sweet? Too soft? Too synthetic? Too yucky? But that begs questions: what is the required degree of sweetness, softness, naturalness and non-yuckiness and how are these things to be measured? The same questions arise when you realise that what you are eating is excellent. Yes, you know it is because something inside you goes ‘wow’ - but what is the precise criteria for wow-ness to occur?

This was one of those ‘wow’ moments but I’d boxed myself into a corner. I couldn’t describe it without sounding either too detached and scientific or too intense and poetic and, let’s face it, neither a technical nor literary explanation are required over Sunday lunch, even in the murky recess of your own mind. Yes, it hit all the buttons for texture (soft with a bit of give) and for sweetness (not too much but, then, not too little) and the dusting of powdered biscuit on the top was, um, what? - icing on the cake? What a relief, I thought, that they hadn’t been offering the gastronomic weekend menu (as advertised) because if they had I’d have been wading through yet another plate of pão-de-ló. I always think that the best things about pão-de-ló are that it doesn’t take long to eat and there is never any agonising over how to describe it. ‘Meh’ always manages it so well.

There’s nothing I shall do with this information. I don’t have a chart recording the excellence – or otherwise – of the various bolos de bolacha that I’ve sampled over the years. The reason that I don’t have such a chart is, first, because I’m not twelve years old, but also because reducing anything, even cake, to a ‘this thing is better than that thing’ simplicity is usually silly nonsense. To be clear, I won’t indulge in meaningless comparisons though I’m quite happy to indulge in as much bolo de bolacha sampling as I can fit in.