May 13, 2023
Day 73: Montreal - One
Sabrina provided a good explanation of the Montreal Portuguese Chicken puzzle. The puzzle is that Montreal is covered with chicken BBQ places designated Portuguese, while we really could not find this kind of thing in actual Portugal. The answer is that there are a lot of food products in North America that are somehow linked to a foreign country, but which really can not be found like that in the foreign place. The easiest example would be pizza such as New York pizza, which can not really be found in Italy. And General Tso's chicken is a chinese dish that can not be found in China. According to Wikipedia, "although the dish was named after Zuo Zongtang (Tso Tsung-t'ang) (1812–1885), a Qing dynasty statesman and military leader from Hunan Province, he could not have eaten the dish or known of it. The dish is found neither in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province, nor in Xiangyin County, where Zuo was born. Zuo's descendants living in Xiangyin County said that they had never heard of such a dish."
Probably the General Tso dish was invented by Chinese immigrants to New York, based on chinese sauce principles. Similarly, the Portuguese chicken in Montreal comes from Portuguese immigrants, no doubt based on something they saw back home. The Montreal restaurants add to this genuine pastel de nata, and decorate with Barcelos chickens.
Listening to me rant about all this, Sabrina went out and got an order of Portuguese chicken from Aquinta, restaurant that the family here has been patronizing for ages, thinking nothing of it. The order included pastel de nata, which Dodie and I rate as full Portugal quality. They also do offer a lot of squid and octopus and sausage, all of which is recognizable from actual Portugal.
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The kind of frigid hell that we found in Montreal in March has turned into a garden paradise, with the stores stuffed with bedding plants. Birds are out in abundance too, such as those below:
It's also time to get all available bikes into shape for the season. I was pleased to find that nine year old Joseph can now be real help with bike mechanics. He has good manual dextrerity, and understood fully as we disassembled a rim brake pad, swapping the wide and the thin spacer along the pad shaft.
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