Family recipes have the superpower of taking us back to places that don’t exist anymore and make us feel like we are close to the ones we love.
I am having a lot of fun collecting, testing and organising family recipes. Today I have made my granny’s Nogados, and, OMG, It’s just like being back in Alentejo, o,r opening the big cardboard pack, full of sweets, that she used to send to our home in Lisbon before Christmas. Granny Linda had a very temperamental personally but we all loved her so much and no doubt that her grandchildren were the most important thing in the world. She didn’t enjoy cooking savoury but she absolutely loved to produce beautiful sweets for all her grandchildren. Before Christmas or Easter she would take a big cardboard box lined it with the most white sheet you can possibly imagine, and she would put her dedicate sweets inside and wrap it carefully. Sweets usually involved a lot of sugar or honey, so they kept for a long time. Then my grandfather Manuel would carry 2 big boxes to the bus station, and he would dispatch one to Lisbon and another one to Algarve.
These suits are traditional from Alentejo, a part of the country that suffered a huge influence from Moroccan cuisine, and Nogados are just one of the examples of the Moors influence in our cuisine.
A good friend of mine, that owns a beautiful house in Spain, brought me some lemon leaves from his courtyard and they couldn’t resist and made the recipe just how I remembered my granny doing it.
I am having a lot of fun collecting, testing and organising family recipes. Today I have made my granny’s Nogados, and, OMG, It’s just like being back in Alentejo, o,r opening the big cardboard pack, full of sweets, that she used to send to our home in Lisbon before Christmas. Granny Linda had a very temperamental personally but we all loved her so much and no doubt that her grandchildren were the most important thing in the world. She didn’t enjoy cooking savoury but she absolutely loved to produce beautiful sweets for all her grandchildren. Before Christmas or Easter she would take a big cardboard box lined it with the most white sheet you can possibly imagine, and she would put her dedicate sweets inside and wrap it carefully. Sweets usually involved a lot of sugar or honey, so they kept for a long time. Then my grandfather Manuel would carry 2 big boxes to the bus station, and he would dispatch one to Lisbon and another one to Algarve.
These suits are traditional from Alentejo, a part of the country that suffered a huge influence from Moroccan cuisine, and Nogados are just one of the examples of the Moors influence in our cuisine.
A good friend of mine, that owns a beautiful house in Spain, brought me some lemon leaves from his courtyard and they couldn’t resist and made the recipe just how I remembered my granny doing it.
