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. According to the story, Brás (older spelling Braz) kept a tavern in Bairro Alto in the later nineteenth century and created the dish single-handed. He is said to have belonged to the large community that migrated from Spanish Galicia to Lisbon.

Yet no source has been found that shows whether this Brás existed, or when and how he first made the dish, and the earliest record of his name attached to it has yet to turn up. Dishes of salt cod and egg, meanwhile, were being written down long before the Brás tradition. A manuscript written around 1715 by Francisco Borges Henriques (National Library of Portugal, Cod. 7376) records one as 'frigideiras de bacalhau.' That is more than 150 years before the later nineteenth century, when the story places Brás's tavern. The mid-eighteenth-century book of Lucas Rigaud, too, gives soaked cod combined with egg and butter.

The dish's name does not lead back to Brás either. A 1936 Portuguese cookbook (by Olleboma) carries the dish, but under the name 'bacalhau mexido com ovos'—cod scrambled with eggs—a plain description with no cook's name in it. When the name 'Brás' became attached to the dish is not known.

For now, two accounts of its origins stand side by side. In one, the present form took shape in a Bairro Alto tavern in the later nineteenth century, built on older cod dishes, and took the name of its proprietor, Brás. In the other, cod-and-egg scrambles changed little by little over a long stretch of time and reached their present shape without any one person's invention. The version with fried potato came together only after the potato had spread through Portugal at the end of the eighteenth century. Whether the tavern of the story took that last step is something the older recipes cannot settle. The Brás story still lacks a record to support it, but it has not been shown to be a fabrication either.