"The necessity that brought Alheira sausage — a soft web of bread, garlic, paprika, and poultry designed to mimic pork sausage — into the world is of a different category to the other dishes on this list. Jews who had fled the Spanish Inquisition for Portugal, and found themselves persecuted once more in their new home, were the inventors of this unusual delicacy. A community in hiding, they created a poultry sausage that could hang from their ceilings, just as Christians dried and displayed their pork sausages. These days, the once clandestine recipe has been absorbed into, and transformed, by wider Portuguese cuisine. Many versions of the popular sausage now contain pork, and at Snack Bar Grelha Douro, this smoky horseshoe is best eaten with bread for cutlery, eyes glued to the football." - Hester van Hensbergen
