“I’m considered [part] of the younger generation,” says Kuchar. Thus there’s a responsibility to carry on traditions, which is why her mother began passing down recipes as soon as the family settled in their new home of America. “My mother was always active in the kitchen frying the pork that would become the bifanas. And when she wasn’t able to do it anymore, I stepped in. She always said, ‘Aprende porque eu não viverei para sempre.’ Which is, ‘You have to learn because I’m not going to live forever.’” At every feast she showcases the traditions her mother helped preserve.
The festival at St. Michael’s, big and bustling as it may be, is not the only gathering for the Portuguese diaspora in the region. Every June, Provincetown, on the tip of Cape Cod, celebrates the town’s Portuguese seafaring heritage with the annual feast called the Blessing of the Fleet. The tradition started as a small festival in 1947 and now welcomes a few thousand people each year. But neither of these festivals is the biggest: Yearly, in July, around 200,000 visitors flock to New Bedford for the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, a celebration of the culture of Madeira, another Portuguese archipelago west of Africa. Like the parish feast at St. Michael’s, this event has been happening for over a century. Then, in late August, the Great Feast of the Holy Ghost draws some 100,000 attendees from around the United States and Canada to Fall River’s Kennedy Park, and it has grown into the largest celebration of Azorean culture in the nation since its inception in 1986.
While this calendar mirrors the timing of religious festivals in the motherland, Portuguese culture thrives year-round in Massachusetts. There are landmarks like Fall River’s City Gates Plaza, which features a monument that mimics the medieval triple gates in the capital of the Azores, but always there are places to taste this heritage, for the homesick and those entirely new to the cuisine.
For the uninitiated it can be hard to sum up a food that incorporates regions as diverse as volcanic shores and lush, landlocked valleys. And yet children of the diaspora are trying. For chef George Mendes—who snagged a Michelin star for his now closed modern Portuguese restaurant in New York City, Aldea, and later helmed Amar in Boston—the cuisine is synonymous with comfort. “What comes to mind about Portuguese cuisine is the simplicity, the grandmother’s approach to it all,” says Mendes, who was raised by immigrants from the central Dão region of continental Portugal, in Danbury, Connecticut. “It’s a very humble cuisine. The Portuguese pantry is onions, garlic, bay leaf, olive oil, good sea salt, smoked paprika. Then a lot of the cuisine is based out of refogado, that stewing or bubbling in olive oil of the onions and garlic and bay leaf.”
Bacalhau, or salt cod, is another go-to ingredient, a pantry staple of North Atlantic cod dried and preserved with salt. Centuries before refrigeration, bacalhau provided reliable access to fish for those who even lived in Portugal’s interior. A historic affection for the ingredient led to the nickname of o fiel amigo, or the faithful friend—and today customers of Portugalia Marketplace on Bedford Street in Fall River will spot the moniker on a glass wall that separates a white-tiled, gleaming temperature-controlled room brimming with salt cod.
Michael Benevides, Portugalia’s vice president, hopes this market can serve as one means of bridging the gap between Fall River’s Portuguese past and present—and open the door to those outside the community who hope to step in and explore. Portugalia sells a little bit of everything: imported artisan olive oil, fresh cheeses, homewares, and dishes of codfish and chicken and rice in the hot bar. He emigrated with his family from Candelária, on the western side of São Miguel, when he was two. His father, Fernando, founded Portugalia in the family’s three-car garage in the back of their tenement home in Fall River in 1988, first selling Portuguese coffee and bacalhau wholesale when he wasn’t working nights at a textile factory. While other kids his age spent summers goofing off, 11-year-old Michael worked in the family business. Through word of mouth, business boomed, leading first to a 4,000-square-foot store, before he became the driving factor behind expanding to the current Eataly-like emporium within a former textile mill.
