Author: Lynn Freehill-Maye / Source: Atlas Obscura
When Teresa Casada was growing up on São Miguel, an island in the Azorean archipelago midway between America and Portugal, she’d visit friends on weekends in the misty, hot-spring-fed parish of Furnas and be amazed.
Families there would tuck a pot of meat and vegetables in a hole in the ground. Six hours later, without them doing anything more, the food would come out cooked in a flavorful stew with a sulfuric tang. This was cozido das Furnas, a twist on traditional Portuguese cozido stew that’s cooked by Furnas’s natural volcanic heat.The nine mountainous islands of the Azores, which are lush with grass, palms, pines, and wildflowers, are newborns by land-mass standards. They’re located on a ridge where the North American, African, and Eurasian tectonic plates collide; volcanoes formed some of their islands as little as 300,000 years ago. (In contrast, Pangea started breaking up into the current continents some 200 million years ago.) The Azores still hiss with geothermal activity, especially around Furnas, where a volcanic crater formed an impressive caldeira lake.
Azoreans take advantage of their hot springs for soaking, and they use their fumaroles—hissing natural steam vents where volcanic gas billows from underground—for cooking. This steaming-by-volcano method is rare. Cooking over lava goes on in Hawaii, a restaurant on the Spanish island of Lanzarote built a volcano-heated grill, and in Iceland, bakers deposit boxes of dough to create a dense bread. But burying pots of stew in pits like this is unique to the Azores.
In mainland Portugal, the tradition of villages making cozido dates back hundreds of years, and the history of cozido das Furnas is said to go nearly as long. (Archaeologists have found hints of a human presence in the Azores thousands of years ago, but the Portuguese found the islands uninhabited around 1427.) Families long enjoyed the local cozido—which usually included pigs’ ears, pork belly, chicken, taro root, carrots, cabbage, and garlic, along with a blood sausage called morcela—as a festive weekend dish.
Since 2007, Teresa Casada has been chef and owner of a cozy snack bar-restaurant called Vale das Furnas. She keeps those celebratory old traditions in mind as she makes her stew. At her restaurant, she wears a tidy plaid vest of the same bright blue seen on Portuguese azulejos, the traditional glazed tile signs found on streets and buildings all over the Azores.
“[Azoreans] prepared cozido not only because it was cheap, but because it was special cooking and tasted different for when the family got together,” she tells me through a translator, sitting down at my table after dinner…
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