*With acknowledgement to my nephew Saul, who was, for me at least, the first to compose a variation on a theme by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

By the time you read this, Bernice and I will have come to the end of the two weeks of self-isolation imposed on us when we returned from Portugal. We will then, seamlessly, have moved into an indefinite period of staying at home imposed on us as part of the general population, with a recommendation that I at least (as an over-70 with slight asthma issues) self-isolate completely. Having enjoyed two wonderful weeks exploring and redefining our relationship, we are more than a little reluctant to expose ourselves to the horrors beyond the front door, so we are planning to buy, where possible, online and depend on home delivery. As a consequence, the most dramatic change for us, when our two weeks are up, looks like being the chance to take our own rubbish to the municipal bin at the top of the street, rather than having to ask our wonderful neighbours’ obliging son. We are already arguing about who gets the privilege of first bin bag.

You will, I hope, understand that I am finding it difficult, in the current unpleasantness, to maintain the razor-sharp focus and single-mindedness that have characterised these posts to date, and I crave your forgiveness if I ramble a bit this week.

First, the big news. I know each of you has been on the edge of your seat over the residential status of Tslil and Tao; I can now put your minds at rest with the news that Tslil now has her visa, and so the kids are all set for the next few years, until they are entitled to apply for permanent residency status, and, ultimately, citizenship.

And now I feel a pensée coming on. When we were in Portugal last, I started to be aware that thinking about my blog was providing a ground bass to the unfurling melody of my life. In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with…*

*Very long parenthetical comment here. As part of its desperate attempt to attract a younger audience, BBC Radio 3 (a station devoted to classical music and the arts) has issued guidelines to its presenters. Among these is a total ban on phrases such as: ‘Of course’ or ‘As everyone knows’, as in ‘As everyone knows, the young Bach walked the 400 miles from Armstadt to Lubeck to hear Buxtehude’s organ-playing’, or:‘Of course, by the time Mozart was my age, he had been dead for 35 years’ (pace Tom Lehrer –although when he first coined this joke, it was ‘dead for 2 years’, as Lehrer was only 37 at the time. 37!!! I’d give 33 years to be 37 again!)  Since I recognise that not all my readers are as fond of baroque music as I am, I have phrased the start of this sentence (I hope) sensitively.

In case ground bass is a term you are not familiar with, it refers to a short theme played on the bass instruments (typically a double bass in jazz or a keyboard instrument in baroque music), which is repeated without variation, and which serves as an anchor for a constantly changing upper-register melody. For a divine example, and as an excuse to hear Alfred Deller’s astonishingly pure voice, listen to Purcell’s Music for a While on YouTube. (Deller was the counter-tenor almost single-handedly responsible for the revival of interest in such music in Britain.)

Welcome back! So, what do I mean when I call my blog the ground bass to the melody of my life? Well, in Portugal, I found that, as each day unfolded, I was increasingly catching myself observing, as if from above, what I was experiencing , and mentally earmarking it for possible inclusion in a blog post. I was also starting to find myself ‘tweaking’ events when I wrote about them in the blog, to highlight a significance or sharpen the humour in an incident. I had even caught myself on one occasion attempting to consciously shape the event in real time so that it would make better copy. This intrigued me, and slightly disturbed me.

As I became conscious of the influence the blog was having on my life, I discussed with Micha’el the phenomenon that I was beginning to become aware of: to my relief, Micha’el recognised what I was describing, and also commented that he feels this is something that we all do all the time as we go through our lives, and we call it memory. The more I think about that, the truer it seems to me.

So, bottom line: don’t take every word here as an accurate account: this is a blog, not a witness statement.

With that last paragraph in mind, I feel emboldened to undertake an activity that seems particularly appropriate to this lockdown age, when increasing numbers of us are experiencing the world virtually. I want now to lecture you on Portuguese cuisine, which is a little like a fish offering to teach you how to ride a bicycle. Bound as I am by the laws of kashrut, I have savoured only three Portuguese ‘dishes’. The first is beer – which is perfectly drinkable, but whose most distinctive feature is that it is inexpensive.

Any serious discussion of food in Portugal has to start with Pastéis de Nata, the little custard tarts that are ubiquitous in Portugal. They even graced the breakfast buffet table of our hotel.

Then, in 1834, they sold the recipe, and three years later, the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opened its doors, and is still selling the pastries 183 years later. I am reliably told that they are to die for, but I have no intention of making them, since they are very labour-intensive, and I would have no way of knowing whether I had captured the authentic flavour. 

Next, we have to talk about chestnuts, which, as I mentioned in an earlier post, are very popular in Portugal. There was once, so they say, a soldier called Martin, who was posted far from home. On a cold winter’s day (bear with me, this does eventually lead to chestnuts), he saw a ragged beggar outside the gates, tore his own cloak in two and gave half of it to the beggar. For this act, he was canonized. His saint’s day is celebrated in Portugal on November 11, and tradition has it (according to the bank employee who was serving us on November 10) that in recognition of the soldier’s act of charity, the weather is always warm and dry on St Martin’s day (as indeed it was last November). In typical Portuguese fashion, the day is celebrated with food and drink. (I suspect that one of the reasons young Israelis like Portugal so much is that they find much that is familiar in the national character of the Portuguese.) In this case, the food is roast chestnuts. The chestnut tree is native to Portugal, and, when we were there in November, the ground was scattered with chestnuts. The supermarkets, on the other hand, were awash with them. On the day itself, marquees were erected in the municipal car-park, and braziers of chestnuts were roasted and eaten. As luck would have it (although my suspicion is that these things are seldom, if ever, determined by luck – many customs and religious traditions naturally arise out of the cycle of the year), November 11 is the first day that the new season’s jeropiga is deemed drinkable. This is a reputedly lethal drink made by adding aguardente (Portuguese brandy) to the residue of grapes from which all the liquid has been crushed to make wine. In English, this pulp is known as grape pomace; in Portuguese, as bagaço de uva, which sounds so much more exotic. Incidentally, the term ‘bagasse’ in English is reserved exclusively for sugar-cane pulp, which is used as a bio-fuel.

Another brief word on chestnuts. Apparently, until the potato took over as the main vegetable in a meal, the go-to accompaniment in Portugal was pureed chestnut.

And, finally, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about salt cod. Of course, no exploration of Portuguese cuisine would be complete if it failed to talk about octopus and pig…but there’s only so much that I’m prepared to write about. You cannot walk into a supermarket in Portugal without being battered about by cod (there’s a joke there, somewhere). Great chunks of salt cod are stacked, shrink-wrapped, in freezer cabinets; slabs of the stuff lie in flat cardboard boxes in the fresh fish department; whole sides hang on butcher’s hooks. The photograph below, taken in our local supermarket, may not look very impressive. While we were shopping one day, I decided to take a couple of photos with my phone, knowing that at some point I wanted to write about this, and no sooner had I started to take shots than a young assistant dashed out of the storeroom and made it very clear that photography was not allowed in the shop. Micha’el told me later that the Portuguese are very sensitive about taking photographs without the subject being aware, but it had, quite honestly, never occurred to me that the cod might object.

Incidentally, my more observant Israeli readers may have spotted, in the background, the origin of the modern Hebrew name for cod, which is bakala.

You may be puzzled as to why a country should abound with salted fish when 70% of its border is coastline, taking in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and nowhere in the country is more than 50 miles from the coast. My curiosity was certainly aroused. Let me save you the trouble of googling, and astound you with the breadth of my erudition. (An erudite person, in case you were wondering, is someone who can google faster than you.) Portugal is replete with recipes for salt cod. Almost any cod recipe will start by telling you to soak the fish, in order to leach out the salt. Some recipes recommend soaking for 6 hours, others for two days, changing the water after 24 hours. Of course, this only begs the question: How on earth did salt cod become such a staple of the Portuguese diet? My research has revealed that Portuguese fishermen, throughout the 16^th Century, would fish the cod grounds off Newfoundland, and, naturally, had to salt the fish they caught to prevent it rotting on the voyage back. The attraction of the banks of Newfoundland was that the shoals were so plentiful and so thick that, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘We hardly have been able to row a boat through them’. Portuguese, Spanish, French and English fishermen would cross the Atlantic to catch cod, until the Portuguese first reduced their involvement after the English raided their fishing fleet in 1585, during the war with Spain, and then withdrew completely after the failure of the Spanish Armada.

The only question still begged that I can think of is: Why is it that, even though Portuguese fishermen stopped needing to salt cod over 300 years ago, salt cod is still a central pillar of Portuguese cuisine? However, as someone who spent four years reading, searching, experimenting and tweaking, until I found the recipe that made it possible for me to bake the exact brown bread (rye bread with caraway seeds ) that I had known in my childhood, I think I know the answer to that question. I can hear Topol in the background, with the whole company singing: ‘Tradition!’. (Surely there can’t be anyone who needs a YouTube link for that?!)

After all this talk of food, let me leave you with some pictures of a young man who already enjoys his food, and very definitely knows what he likes.