C 70/26
EN
Official Journal of the European Union
11.2.2022
It was only much later, in the early 1960s (six decades), that the soup became known as ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’.
The popularity of this local speciality grew in large part thanks to the small grocery store run by the fishmonger José Manuel ‘Toucinho’ and his wife Maria Manuela Aranha, born in 1912 and considered the ‘mother of sopa da pedra’, whose mother Mariana was making this meat and bean soup long before 1960 [see: Morreu a Mãe da Sopa da Pedra YouTube, posted on 4 May 2009].
According to family history, this store in the old part of the town used to cater to travelling salesmen, who would stop off in the neighbourhood to sell their wares and recover their strength for the rest of their journey.
Here they would try some of the regional dishes which the family prepared.
The local soup of beans, potatoes and sausages was a constant on the menu, and a firm favourite among the travellers.
Hélia Costa, daughter of the couple who founded the grocery store and later the restaurant, recounts: ‘These salesmen were also our suppliers, people we knew well.
One day, one of them came to eat, and my mother served him a soup from a recipe that my grandparents used to make.
He enjoyed it so much that he wanted to bring some friends to try it.
But as other soups were made here, in order to be able to identify this specific recipe, he said: “It’s that dark, heavy soup, which looks like the stones in the street”, referring to the area’s cobbled streets.
There are still many such cobbled streets around here.’
The name it was given, inspired by the stones paving the oldest streets in this town in the Ribatejo, became the commercial name for a traditional rustic soup which, by word of mouth, gained fame and attracted visitors to the town, who came there just to try it.
The small grocery store would give rise, in 1962, to the restaurant renowned as ‘the pioneer of Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’.
Over the years, other restaurants opened their doors and started making ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’ in accordance with local recipes, and this culinary activity steadily grew in importance.
Included in Teófilo Braga’s Contos Tradicionais do Povo Português [Traditional Folk Tales from Portugal] (1883), the legend has it that it all began with a friar who cleverly tricked a naive farmer into believing that he made a tasty soup from a stone he was carrying in his pocket.
Potatoes, beans and sausages were added to the stone to make the soup.
Through the association of the name ‘Sopa da Pedra’ with the soup described in the story, and the similarity of its ingredients with those of the Almeirim soup, fact and fiction soon became conflated.
This became an advertisement that helped to popularise the real ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’.
As visitors to restaurants often asked for the stone, it became commonplace to add one to the tureen before serving.
The renown of ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’ has spread throughout the country, and even abroad, thanks to the Confraria Gastronómica de Almeirim [Almeirim Gastronomic Society], whose purpose is to disseminate and preserve the cultural, historical, ethnographic and culinary heritage of this municipality in the Ribatejo.
‘Of all the typical recipes of Almeirim, the Sopa da Pedra clearly stands out.
We travel all over the country to promote it, and have already spread the word in countries such as Spain, France, Belgium and Hungary’ says Rui Figueiredo, the Grand Master of the Society, which, since 2013, has organised the annual ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’ festival.
This traditional speciality is so closely associated with Almeirim, its place of origin, that over the years ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’ has been touted as a major culinary icon, one of Portugal’s best-known specialities on television programmes dedicated to national cuisine (RTP, 2009, 7 Maravilhas da Gastronomia| Sopa da Pedra| Reportagem; RTP Memória, 2017, Horizontes da Memória, Sopa da Pedra, Almeirim, 1999; TV4Ribatejo, 2009, Morreu a Mãe da Sopa da Pedra).
Key figures in the preservation and dissemination of national dishes, such as Maria de Lourdes Modesto, have included ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’ among their popular recipes since the 1960s [Modesto, M.L. (1982), Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa [Traditional Portuguese Cuisine], Verbo, Lisbon, first edition].
The annual Sopa da Pedra festival, held every year since 2013, has already become a key event in the town’s cultural life and brings in thousands of visitors.
With the support of the municipal council, this event is promoted by the Almeirim Gastronomic Society, which was established with the aim of promoting the typical local fare, and in particular ‘Sopa da Pedra de Almeirim’.