Madeira Islands Food & Traditional Cuisine

Madeiran food is simple, Atlantic and closely tied to what the island grows on its terraces and lands from its boats.

The sea gives espada, the black scabbardfish — a long, black, alarming-looking deep-water fish caught on longlines at 800 metres or more, with delicate white flesh — along with tuna, limpets and octopus.

The terraces give bananas, small and intensely sweet, along with sweet potato, passion fruit, custard apple and a great deal else that the subtropical climate allows.

Beef on a laurel skewer is the festa food, cooked over wood at every village gathering.

And bolo do caco, a flat wheat bread cooked on a stone and served with garlic butter, appears at every meal.

Behind all of it is Madeira wine, which is used in the cooking as well as drunk.

Espada com banana is the island’s dish and sounds wrong until you eat it: fillets of black scabbardfish floured and fried, topped with fried banana and sometimes passion fruit sauce. The fish is mild and the sweetness works.

Espetada, cubes of beef rubbed with garlic and salt, threaded on a fresh bay laurel stick and grilled over wood embers, then hung from a stand at the table so the juices run down. The laurel is the point — it perfumes the meat as it cooks.

Bolo do caco, a soft flat bread baked on a basalt slab, split and slathered with garlic and parsley butter.

Lapas, limpets grilled in their shells with butter, garlic and lemon.

Bife de atum com milho frito, tuna steak with cubes of fried maize porridge.

Also: sopa de trigo, a wheat and vegetable soup; bolo de mel, a dense spiced molasses cake made at Christmas and kept for a year; and queijadas.

Mercado dos Lavradores in Funchal is the island’s showpiece market, an art deco building with a flower court, a fish hall where whole espada are laid out black and toothed, and upstairs traders offering slices of exotic fruit. The upstairs fruit sellers are aggressive and overpriced; the ground floor is the real market.

Village festas through the summer are where the food actually is: espetada over wood, bolo do caco, wine from a barrel, and a band.

Poncha is drunk before or with food, and the traditional bars in Camara de Lobos make it to order.

Prato do dia at lunch is the cheap way to eat well.

Couvert arrives unasked and is charged for; declining is fine.

Tipping is modest, around five to ten per cent.

Madeira wine is one of the world’s great fortified wines and the product of a happy accident.

Barrels shipped as ballast on voyages to the Indies and the Americas came back better than they went out: months of heat and motion in the hold had cooked and oxidised the wine into something richer. Producers began reproducing the effect deliberately — either by estufagem, heating the wine in tanks, or for the best wines by canteiro, ageing casks for decades in the warm lofts of the Funchal lodges. The result is almost indestructible: an opened bottle keeps for months, and bottles from the eighteenth century are still drinkable.

Four noble grapes give a scale from dry to sweet — Sercial, Verdelho, Bual and Malmsey — with Tinta Negra making most of the volume. All of it keeps a searing acidity that balances the sweetness.

The Funchal lodges offer tastings and tours, and vintage wines are poured by the glass.

Poncha is the island’s other drink: sugarcane spirit, honey and lemon or passion fruit, mixed with a wooden caralhinho and stronger than it tastes.