ORGULHO PORTUGUÊS EM NOVA IORQUE

Most Portuguese towns are graced with monuments honoring local heroes. Mealhada is a bit different. There’s no stony faced navigator or dreamy bronze poet to greet visitors here. Instead, there’s a three-meter monolith topped with an oversized limestone piglet, its snout pointed skyward in an expression of civic pride in its inhabitants’ prowess in the arts of porcine cuisine.

Mealhada is Portugal’s suckling pig central.

The town of 5,000 is renowned the length and breadth of the land for serving up spit-roasted, crispy skinned and pepper-spiced piglets to thousands of visitors who flock here to scoff platefuls of a cherished recipe known as leitão da Bairrada.

“On peak days we have some restaurants that are serving 800 suckling pigs a day,” says António Duque, founder and president of the Gastronomic Brotherhood of the Bairrada Suckling Pig.

“There’s no gastronomic delicacy in Portugal that’s consumed in such huge quantities,” he says between forkfuls of tender pink flesh. “Do you know how many leitões are eaten in the Bairrada each day? I’ll tell you: 3,000. That’s 15 tons a day.”


A few definitions: Leitão is a Portuguese word for a suckling pig—a piglet in the first weeks of life still feeding on its mother’s milk; leitões is the plural. The Bairrada is a loosely defined region of central Portugal, famed for its wines and piglets. It’s roughly situated between the ancient university city of Coimbra and the watery horizons of the Ria de Aveiro, one of western Europe’s largest saltwater lagoons. To the east, it’s bordered by the lush Serra do Buçaco mountains and on the west, by an unbroken string of Atlantic beaches. Leitão da Bairrada is a vegetarian’s nightmare that involves basting the little porkys in a garlic and pepper sauce, then slow roasting them in a wood oven to obtain a satisfying mix of crunchy golden rind and soft, fat-infused meat.

Pigs are raised and consumed all over Portugal, from the semi-wild black hogs that root for acorns in the cork-oak forest in the southern Alentejo, to the home-reared swine whose blood and innards contribute to unctuous northern specialities like papas de sarabulho. Quite why the Bairrada became specialized in the mini version of the beast is the subject of some speculation. Mr. Duque says the origins are tied up with the region’s wine industry, since vine cuttings were always used to fire up the brick ovens in which leitões are roasted. Some say the local pigs thrived on acorns and chestnuts fallen in the Buçaco forest, giving a particular flavor to their offspring. An 18th-century cookbook found in a local convent gives a recipe remarkably similar to the garlic, lard and black pepper mix that is used to season the piglets today.


The suckling pig business really took off in the early 20th century, when posh hotels opened up in the Bairrada spa towns of Luso and Curia, attracting a big-city clientele who were quickly seduced by the local delicacy. The motor age brought the highway from Lisbon and Porto through the Bairrada and pausing to pig out on a Mealhada roast became de rigueur for drivers traveling between the capital and the second city.

To cope with demand, a string of over 30 restaurants sprung up shoulder-to-shoulder for several kilometers along the EN1 road that runs through the town. Many have grown to an industrial scale with vast car parks, ovens able to hold 30 piglets at a time and capacity to serve hundreds of customers hungry for a tray of moist piglet pieces, usually served with sliced orange, green salad, fried potatoes and a chilled bottle of the region’s sparkling red wine, espumante tinto de bairrada.

No one expects fancy surroundings. These are big, bright places more suited to boisterous family lunches than tête-à-tête dining.

Locals all have their favorites. Pedro dos Leitões, set up by Álvaro Pedro in 1949, is the oldest and best-known, with space for 430 diners. Its neighbor and competitor, A Meta dos Leitões, is of similar dimensions and boasts its own vineyards. The Churrasqueira Rocha is illuminated by a neon sign showing a happy piglet rolling back on a plate of fries and salad. Then there’s O Picnic, Azevedo dos Leitões, Floresta dos Leitões, Basílio dos Leitões and so on. British food writer Nicholas Lander gave up trying to make a choice, and included the whole town on his list of the world’s 25 best restaurants.


Suckling pig snobs may, however, prefer to sidestep the mass pig fests of Mealhada and set off along the byways of the Bairrada in search of a more intimate encounter with leitão, in places like the Mugasa in Sangalhos, or Manuel Júlio in Barcouço. One of the most renowned is Casa Vidal, a discreet place with space for a mere 120 diners in the village of Aguada de Cima. Behind its uncomplicated dining rooms decorated with typical Portuguese ceramic tiles, the whole process of preparing leitão unfolds.

Amid a warren of spotless white-tiled rooms are two spacious pens, one containing a squealing throng of about two dozen of the cutest little piggies, all disturbingly reminiscent of the star of the movie “Babe.” Rural Portugal is, however, no place for sentimentality about farm animals and a kitchen assistant causally points out that the smaller group in the neighboring pen are tomorrow’s lunch. The ideal Portuguese suckling pig is between four and six weeks old when it reaches the oven and weighs between seven and eight kilos.

Mealhada’s great rival for the title of Europe’s suckling pig capital is the Spanish city of Segovia, but there are key differences in the preparation. The Castilians prefer their pig even younger, just a couple of weeks old and weighing in at around four-and-a-half kilos. Rather than roasting them on a spit, the Spanish pigs are splayed, spatchcock style, and baked in clay dishes. Unlike their neighbors, Portuguese prefer to take their piglets away from their mother’s teat for about three days before slaughter to remove the milky taste. Needless to say, Iberian rivalry is intense. (See related article on page W8.)

“The Spanish who come here have a problem, because they walk in full of their own product, but when they walk out they don’t know what to say anymore,” Mr. Duque boasts.
Between the sty and the dining rooms are a series of antiseptic chambers where the nasty stuff goes on. The piglets are brought one-by-one into the slaughterhouse and knocked out by electric shock before the coup-de-grâce. There is little waste in this process; the blood is used along with the heart, lungs and liver to concoct a rich stew with red wine and onion, traditionally baked in the oven with the suckling pig. After the hair and innards are removed, the animal is basted with a paste made of precise measures of garlic, pepper, salt and pig fat, to which some cooks add olive oil, parsley or bay leaf. Sauced-up, the leitão is then impaled on a stainless steel pole, two-and-a-half-meters long, and maneuvered into a wood-fired oven for around two hours.

“It’s an art,” says restaurant owner José Vidal. “The timing is critical and it varies depending on the breed, the size and how much fat the suckling pig has. Get it wrong and it’s dried out, ruined.”

In the Bairrada, roasting pigs is man’s work typically carried out by beefy chaps with strong nerves and muscular forearms. Known as assadores, they are depicted in heroic style in glazed tile panels in restaurants around the region.

“These days people like to talk about the chefs of fancy restaurants,” Mr. Duque says with a hint of a sneer. “A chef is a guy who lives in an air-conditioned world, with the ingredients all prepared for him in advance. An assador is a man who gets up at 6 in the morning, kills the piglets, goes though the whole process of preparation and does all his own work.”

It’s a job requiring brains as well as brawn, says Mr. Duque. The size of the piglet, the breed, the type of wood used in the oven can all alter the way the beast is cooked. The mustachioed director of a local plastic packaging firm, Mr. Duque set up the brotherhood in 1995, to protect the leitão from “attempts to make easy money while failing to respect the quality of the product.”

The members dress in black-trimmed-orange robes embroidered with a stylized piglet for their regular celebrations of all things suckling pig. They are not always popular with the region’s restaurants.

“They don’t like us because we defend a traditional product. We don’t support the commercial option,” he says. “We want the most traditional product as possible.”

That means they prefer their leitões to come from the local bísaro pig breed, which is tricky for the assadores because its low fat level means it requires extra attention to prevent it drying out in the oven. While most restaurants serve leitão with fries, the brotherhood wants only boiled potatoes.

“Do you want to mix one fat with another? It doesn’t make sense,” Mr. Duque insists, pointing with scorn to the pan of fries bubbling away in the Casa Vidal kitchens. “We are eating natural fat, why would you want to mix it with that stuff.”

In a concession to commercial modernity, he does acknowledge that hygiene and time concerns mean the suckling pigs are roasted on metal stakes rather than the traditional laurel branches and that the sauce is made in electric blenders instead of being slowly ground by mortar and pestle. His accompaniment of choice is a bottle of the local sparkling white wine, espumante da Bairrada.

The leitão should be carved into pieces as small as possible to ensure dinners get a good mixture of meat from the legs, ribs and neck. Even better, if there are enough diners around the table, the beast should be brought in whole from head-to-tail on a porcelain tray, like in the old days when the head would be ceremonially severed with the edge of a plate to show the leitão had been cooked to perfection, Mr. Duque recalls with relish.

“This is a noble product. The leitão needs to be treated with care, treated with respect.”