Slow food travel in Portugal: a field guide

How to travel with the season, read a market and find the producer behind the plate. Twelve chapters, in the order you would use them:

• 1. What slow food travel actually means — A working definition you can act on, and the four things it is not: expensive, rural, slow-moving or nostalgic.
• 2. The Portuguese year — What is ripe, caught, pressed or cured in each month, and how to choose your week before you choose your hotel.
• 3. Reading a Portuguese market in twenty minutes — Where to start, what the price boards tell you, and the three questions that make a stallholder stop being polite and start being useful.
• 4. Talking to a producer — Four questions that open a door, one that closes it, and what to do when the answer is that they do not sell to visitors.
• 5. Small batches, on purpose — Why some producers decide not to grow, what that decision costs them, and how to tell a small operation from a small label.
• 6. Foodscapes — Montado, ria, serra and lava: four Portuguese landscapes, and how to read each one as a menu before you have eaten anything.
• 7. Preserved on purpose — Salt cod, olives in brine and black garlic: how the work of keeping food alive through winter created the flavours people now travel for.
• 8. Break bread — How a Portuguese table works: sharing, timing, the couvert, who pays, and the difference between being served and being welcomed.
• 9. Eating the coast in season — Which fish in which months, which sizes to leave in the sea, and how to ask at a counter without sounding like an inspector.
• 10. Work as a visit — Olive harvests, grape harvests, mills and bread ovens: the days of the year when you can join real work, and how to behave once you are in the way.
• 11. Slow logistics — Trains, one town a day, and the argument for booking lunch before you book dinner.
• 12. Take it home — What travels, what spoils, what an airline will accept, and what to buy instead when the honest answer is nothing.

Two files, one purchase. The PDF is laid out for a laptop, a tablet or paper: it keeps the maps, the calendars and the photographs exactly where we put them. The EPUB reflows, so it behaves on a phone or an e-reader and lets you change the type size. Kindle readers can send the EPUB across with Amazon's Send to Kindle. There is no app to install, no account to create and no connection needed once the files are on your device. Together they weigh PDF 18 MB and EPUB 5 MB.

Note: print from the PDF. The seasonal calendar is designed to work on a kitchen wall.

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Oh! My Cod has been running food and culture tours in Portugal since 2016 — long enough to have been in the wrong month, in the wrong region, on the wrong day of the week, and to have written down what we learned each time. This field guide was written by the Oh! My Cod guides team and edited by Oh! My Cod, Lda., from work across the mainland and the Azores. The project's work was recognised at the Prémio Nacional de Turismo 2024 (Best Gastronomic Project). Photography by Photography by Oh! My Cod.

Note: everything in here is a method, not a promise. Seasons move, and so should you.