The cataplana: a good invention
For many years Portugal was occupied by the Arabs . His mark is present in everything: architecture, art and also cuisine. The taste of coriander in stews, the touch of certain sweets and the use of kitchen tools as Moorish as the cataplana. The Moors arrived in Portuguese lands with the stores of their ships full. The customs in the yantar made, surely, that the navigators took some of their essential kitchen gadgets like, for example, the tajine.
The Tajine is a clay kitchen instrument made up of a plate and a cone-shaped lid. The utensil has given its name to the meat, fish and vegetable dishes that are made with this pot, by the way a beautiful kitchen utensil so easy to find in any Moroccan street market. You could say that the tajine is the first pressure cooker in history . On its plate it is fried and with its lid it is stewed. The cone-shaped lid acts as an 'aroma catcher' of 'flavor concentrator'... so the use of the tajine helps us on the one hand to cook and on the other hand to vaporize.
Well, from that tajine that the Moors brought to Portugal a tool similar in its use but different in its shape was created in the Algarve, what is now known as a cataplana . It is known that the first cataplana in history was a brass instrument; today copper is prohibited for culinary use, so the cataplana of the 21st century has a silvery appearance, with a flat base suitable for new forms of cooking. It is used in cooking, especially in the Algarve, to make fish and shellfish. The result is some dishes that receive double cooking and therefore a unique concentration of aromas : peixe or shellfish a la cataplana, or clams are typical.
When you order this dish, they put the cataplana on the table, they open it before your eyes and suddenly a cloud of aromas of the sea, coriander, orchard invades you... In Lisbon you will find cataplanas in a hardware store located in front of the Santa Luzia viewpoint –you can get there with tram 28-; and in the Algarve, a good place to sit and enjoy a cataplana of fish is Jorge Do Peixe.