Mostly Harmless

"The greatest friend of Portugal is bacalhau," said Fernando Santos, an officer of the Friends of Bacalhau, a club that has 46 chapters around the world, hosts salt cod lunches and distributes cod-decorated neckties, pins, baseball caps, T-shirts and flags. "It has always come from afar, but it is part of our identity."

 

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"Frozen is the best! Frozen is the future!" said Gonçalo Guedes Vaz, managing director of Rui Costa e Sousa, a major producer of both frozen and traditional bacalhau, at the company's state-of-the-art processing plant in this northwestern port city. "Women have no time to stay home and soak. So we do the job for them. Traditional cod soon will be a thing of the past."

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"I never ate the frozen stuff but I hear from people who have that it's disgusting," said Fernando Pereira, who sells nine grades of the stiff, salt-caked whole fish in his shop, King of Bacalhau, alongside dusty bottles of port, absinthe, whiskey and olive oil, open sacks of beans and grains and packages of cod cheeks, face and tongue.