Cooking for Arcata’s Our Lady of Fatima Celebration Maria Homen peels back the paper covering one of a half dozen metal baking pans to reveal rows of browned and bumpy filhos (pronounced “fee-losh” with the lush rounding of so many Portuguese words at the end) tossed in table sugar. She and the crew of ladies in the kitchen at the back of the Portuguese Hall of Arcatacame in at 6: 30 a. m. to fry some 300 of them to be sold for $2 each later that night after church service and a candlelit procession carrying a statue of the Virgin Mary back to its plinth. The procession is part of the annual Our Lady of Fatima Celebration, stretching back to 1917, when a trio of children reported the Virgin Mary appearing in Fatima, Portugal. In Arcata, it brings together the largely Catholic Portuguese American community for reciting the Rosary and attending mass at nearby St. Mary’s Church, raising money to maintain the hall and to sit down for a communal Sunday meal of sopas and alcatra. That means days of cooking. Along with the filhos, there will be grilled linguiça served in buns and bifanas, the national sandwich of Portugal, comprised of thinly sliced and marinated pork loin on a roll. Deolina Sousa taps her fingers counting out the ingredients in the marinade: salt, pepper, allspice, vinegar, white wine, garlic and hot pepper sauce. “I don’t measure my stuff,” she says with a shrug. “Portuguese people don’t have recipes,” chimes in Lucille Fraga, sitting across from her at a corner seat in the kitchen, earning a nod from Sousa. Born on the island of Pico in the Azores, Sousa came to Arcata in 1971 at 19 years old. She’s cooked at the hall and for St. Mary’s Church events on and off since her arrival with her family, but she’s prepared food for the Our Lady of Fatima Celebration at the Portuguese Hall for the last 12 years. This batch of meat, Sousa explains, has been marinating for three days. The leftover marinade will cook in a pot as well, before it’s strained and poured over the quickly pan-fried pork for baking in the oven. The lean meat emerges seasoned through with a hint of the vinegar’s tang. The flavor, she says, is traditional to her roots but it might vary year to year. “Depends who’s cooking.” Homen, also from the Azores, says she grew up helping with cooking in her rural home while her parents worked in the fields as farmers. “I remember being 8 years old and taking lunch to them,” she says. Coming to the U. S. at 16 some 45 years ago was, she says, “a very big change, when you don’t speak the language.” She worked on a ranch with other Portuguese people, finding her footing in the community and, at the hall, a place to continue familiar traditions. Of the Our Lady of Fatima Celebration and its accompanying feast of sopas and alcatra, she says, “It’s almost the same.” Michael Fraga shifts the lid from an enormous pot to reveal a simmering gravy-brown broth with sprigs of wilted mint drifting at the surface. It’s his ninth year handling the stars of Sunday’s lunch, the sopas (a spiced broth with cabbage served over staled bread) and alcatra (slow-cooked seasoned beef). “Years ago, people from Flores were not cooks, people from Terceira were cooking,” he says, referencing the different island roots of much of the community. Still, he says, “I would always help with the meat because I was a big guy.” One year the head cook fell ill and Michael Fraga took over with his own team of helpers. It can be a tough crowd to cook for, especially when it comes to family. “If you cook the sweet bread, my grandmother would say, ‘You left the sugar at home,’ or something like that,” he says, adding it can be intimidating to come into the kitchen to learn. Friday night he starts the soup, stuffing the meat and bones in a cotton pillowcase and simmering them overnight with garlic, onions and a blend of spices including allspice, cinnamon, bay leaf and pickling spice. Saturday, around 5 a. m., he returns to remove the alcatra meat to be refrigerated until Sunday. The spices and aromatics from cooking the meat go back in the pot. It’s not yet halfway done, but Michael Fraga offers a sample, tearing hunks of stale white bread into a metal bowl and covering them with a ladle of broth, smashing the mixture a bit with a sprig of mint. The bread takes up the soup, softening, and the deep consommé flavor is fragrant and rich, like a savory bread pudding with pan drippings. After tasting and adjusting the flavor, that evening he adds three whole chickens, smoked pork belly and a gallon of dry white Carlo Rossi wine not water, he insists, lest the flavor be diluted and leaves the pot for another overnight simmer. He’s in by 4 a. m. to remove the chicken, pork and spice bags, and to give the cabbage time to cook down, as well as to heat the alcatra (an estimated 300 pounds of it) in the oven in time for the noon meal. Before serving, the cooks will tear the staled bread and press it to the bottoms of smaller pots with sprigs of fresh mint onto which they’ll ladle broth and cabbage, letting it sit a moment before shuttling it out to the crowds at the long tables crowding the hall for lunch. “When you pour the broth over the bread,” Michael Fraga says, “that mint is magical.” “When I was a kid I used to help in the kitchen, I watched and I learned. It’s not rocket science,” he says. It is, however, hard, physical work. “I’m getting old and I want somebody to take over. I want to sit out there and eat.” Everyone sits down for an informal lunch of pork shoulder and onions cooked with the bifana seasonings, served with mashed potatoes and glass jugs of Burgundy on the table. A man at the middle of the long table puts his fork down and starts singing in Portuguese, his hands drifting along in the air before him with the tune. Volunteers and committee members are still clearing away the plates and glasses, but Homen, Sousa and the four other women cooking the pork are already back in the kitchen, readying frying pans. Behind them on the counter are steel bowls piled with meat for the bifanas that will take hours more to cook. Tiffany Morais, who tends bar at hall functions, picks up a bottle of amber Aniz Escarchado, its base solid with a layer of sugar and a floating stem of dried anise. This, she explains with her eyebrows raised, is what the ladies sip here and there while they cook. It’s sweet and herbaceous, with the kick of brandy. Homen lifts a shot glass, saying, “I’m not a sipper. I just drink,” before tipping it back and returning to the line forming along the stoves. The women murmur to each other in Portuguese and English as they flip slices of pork in bubbling oil, the sound of it shush-shush-ing as they talk, eyes on the work in front of them. Jennifer Fumiko Cahill (she/her) is the managing editor at the Journal. Reach her at (707) 442-1400 ext. 106, or jennifer@northcoastjournal. com. Follow her on Bluesky @jfumikocahill. bsky. social.
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