Foods I love #5: Bolo de cenoura

      Carrots and I go way back. To the days when my mother would serve frozen peas and carrots and I would instinctively go for the orange cubes. Who wouldn't? The peas were mushy and green and gross and I hated them. But the carrots — bright, sweet, and encouraging.
      Later they were crinkle cut and, even better, roasted. Glazed with brown sugar at Thanksgiving.

     Carrots are root vegetables, meaning they grow underground. But compare them with their cousin, the potato. Tubers are big brown lumps of mundanity that must be enlivened by ketchup or sour cream or cheese. Carrots are slimmer, sexier, yet harder to find, as if the great mass food manufacturers can't be bothered coping with their complexities. Carrots are more colorful, more exciting, yet it is potatoes that McDonald's fries in enormous quantities, some nine million tons a day, worldwide. Mickey D's only sells carrot sticks in a few niche markets, like Ireland. 

     To be honest, I am not a fan of carrots in their raw form. I will eat them, and even enjoy them if you heap enough humus on one end. But a carrot stick is work, crunchy in a bad way, grainy in the mouth.

     But what wonders can be done with them with the application of heat, ingenuity and fat.
     When my wife and I got married in 1990, my sole contribution to the wedding dinner menu was to suggest we start with cream of carrot soup with ginger. I've ordered many a main course simply because it came with carrots.  One River North eatery served a carrot salad, with pine nuts that drew me in regularly. Then it was gone. I complained, and after the waiter explained that carrots were not in season, I objected. "They sit in cellars for months," I believe were my exact words, and didn't go back for years. A head of lettuce will last three weeks in the fridge; a fresh carrot will be good for three months.

     I can't say I am always on the look-out for carrots — that would lead to too much disappointment. They're that rare. But carrots have a way of finding me.
     Earlier this week, at the excellent Padaria Ribeiro bakery in Porto, Portugal, my attention was drawn to dense orange triangles, covered with chocolate sprinkles. 
     "What are those, sweet potato?" I asked, tapping on the glass case.
     "No, carrot," the clerk said. That focused my attention like a star flare. The magic word. I ordered one, with coffee Americain, and took a seat at one of the little tables outside, watching the university students, in their colorful top hats and canes, parade by.
     English is prevalent in Portugal. But when I went back into the bakery, after we consumed the orange slice in a delirium of pleasure, and asked what it was we had eaten, she said, "bolo de cenoura."  Simply Portuguese for "carrot cake," but this was not like the traditional American carrot cake with cream cheese frosting you'd find at Gibson's. It didn't have pieces of carrots. This was almost more like a pudding. The carrots are pureed. 

      What histories I could find said that the dessert was created in Brazil, Portugal's former colony, in the 1960s, based on American carrot cake, then filtered back to the mother country. 

      To my delight, my wife enjoyed it as much as I did, and immediately found a promising New York Times recipe. Which we will have a chance to whip up now that we are home — today, if all goes well — after our near fortnight in Portugal. I appreciate your patience, with last week's metaphor series and this week's favorite food series. They were fare I could whip up ahead of time and leave sit until it was time for them to be consumed — well, except for this one, pounded out in a guest house room in Porto Tuesday night, with memories of a superlative slice of bolo de cenoura still very fresh in mind.