Bacalhau à Brás Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Bacalhau à Brás is a Portuguese dish in which soaked salt cod, matchstick potatoes, and eggs are scrambled together and brought to a soft, barely-set finish. It is said to have taken its present form in the taverns (tascas) of Bairro Alto, Lisbon's old quarter, in the later nineteenth century.

Salt cod had become indispensable to the Portuguese table through the Atlantic trade. The other lead ingredient, the potato, came from the New World, and only toward the end of the eighteenth century did it become widely eaten in Portugal. The form we know now, with fried potato folded through, could not appear until the tuber had spread across the country. Soaked cod, matchstick potato, and egg—three ingredients brought together, and the handwork of scrambling them in a single pan into a soft mass—give the dish its outline.

The setting where it was served was the plain, working-class eatery. Cheap salt cod, and the unstinting labour of soaking and shredding it, took root as food for the streets of Lisbon.

A story about the name follows this dish everywhere. 'Brás' (in the older spelling Braz) was the proprietor of a Bairro Alto tavern in the later nineteenth century, and he, so the telling goes, was the sole creator of the dish. He is said to have belonged to the large community that migrated from Spanish Galicia to Lisbon.

Yet no source has been found that confirms who this Brás actually was, or when and how he devised the dish. On the contrary, a dish made the same way—soaked cod and eggs scrambled together—appears in records far older than the Brás tradition. A manuscript written around 1715 by Francisco Borges Henriques (National Library of Portugal, Cod. 7376) records it as 'frigideiras de bacalhau,' and the mid-eighteenth-century book of Lucas Rigaud shows soaked cod combined with egg and butter. That is some 150 years before Brás is supposed to have kept his tavern.

Trace the naming, and it points the same way. A 1936 Portuguese cookbook (by Olleboma) carries the dish, but there the name is not Brás; it is 'bacalhau mexido com ovos'—cod scrambled with eggs. The name 'Brás' seems to have been fixed to the finished dish after the fact.

Set side by side, another face emerges. Bacalhau à Brás branched off, little by little, from older cod dishes made much the same way; it was never a dish that required a single inventor. The sweet story of who came first fades before the older manuscripts.