Bragança is a small town in northern Portugal that relies on animal husbandry rather than seafood as its main food source due to its inland location. Two iconic dishes from the region are posta à mirandesa, a beef steak, and alheira, a smoked sausage made from meats other than pork to avoid detection during the Inquisition. Sweet rice is also a traditional dessert that was valued for its cinnamon drawings given the region's poverty and reliance on locally grown ingredients like rice, wheat and rye.

1. Food in Trás-os-
Montes

3. Bragança is a small town in the north of
Portugal.We don´t have
the sea near us, so our main food source
is the animals we raise.

4. Like this “Posta à
mirandesa” appeared.

5. Posta à Mirandesa

6. Alheira

7. Alheira appeared when the Jews were being harassed by
The Inquisition. As they didn’t eat pork, they would be
easily identified by their pursuers by not eating the smoked
pork sausage. So, they replaced the pork by a huge variety
of other meats, such as veal, rabbit, turkey, duck and
chicken, sometimes partridge, tucked into richly seasoned
dough of wheat bread. Garlic played an important part as it
cleverly disguised the lack of pork if any investigation
would be carried out.
Alheira” nowadays appears like a reutilization of the porc
meat that can not be used to make steaks. To make
“alheiras” was and still is a way of being with friends and
family, because when in the village someone makes them
all the other people come to help and meahwhile they
catch up with each other.

8. Sweet Rice

9. • Trás os Montes was a poor region, and our main activity was agriculture
so we had to live from what the earth gave us: meat, vegetables and cere
like wheat, rye and rice. Like that Sweet Rice is one of the desserts typic
from this region. The decoration is made with cinnamon and, due to the
poverty of ingredients the dessert was valued by his drawings, which w
many times a masterpiece.

10. The end…