Maria Lawton: Food Memories as a Time Machine

At My Portuguese Table

by Maria Lawton

reviewed by LOUISA KASDON

Tucked into Dartmouth, MA, lives an unstoppable life force named Maria Lawton. Two words could define her: drive and authenticity. Why should you take notice? Her new cookbook isn’t just a cookbook, it’s an all-expenses-paid trip to the Azores and an invitation to a host of meals with her family.

Azorean to her core, Maria Lawton does many things in twos: two seasons of an award-winning PBS cooking and travel show, two languages (English and her native Portuguese) and of course, dual Portuguese and American citizenship… and now her second cookbook, At My Portuguese Table. It’s a gorgeous and approachable book, like a long languid trip to São Miguel, the Azorean archipelago where Maria spent her first six years. “I am very proud of who I am and where I came from,” she says. Although Maria married an English/Irishman, she notes that she is the only one in her family “who married outside of the Portuguese community in the South Coast.” On her mother’s side, Maria can trace her family back to 1746 on the Portuguese mainland.

Her career as a professional cookbook writer and TV host began in the most human of ways. She was in mourning. Over a four-year period in her early fifties, she lost her mother, her father, her brother-in-law, and her beloved grandmother. “When I came up for air, I realized that I had lost all the people I would go to for advice… who taught me the traditions of our homeland. I couldn’t go to my grandmother or my mother anymore and ask, ‘How do I do this, how do I do that’… I lost the long Sunday afternoon lunches in New Bedford, the recipes, the memories of baking with my ever-patient grandmother. And of course, their stories.” Her own mother had died quickly of breast cancer. “When someone is dying, you don’t ask them for their recipes,” she laughs. “My mother cooked with total love.”

When Maria first married, she decided not to compete with her mom and her mastery of Portuguese dishes. Instead, Maria became “a really good Italian cook,” she says, excelling at sauces and pasta. But then, when her mother and grandmother passed, she realized how much she missed the wonderful flavors of her family’s cuisine. Italian food was good, but it wasn’t hers.

Per Maria: “Just re-creating that smell! When I make my grandmother’s recipes I am back in her kitchen.”

Maria explains that Portuguese food has so much history. “History on a plate,” she says. “A true fusion cuisine.” The recipes evoke the Age of Discovery and the Spice Trade, when Portuguese sailors ruled the oceans. Flavors from colonies that Portugal controlled in Africa, India, and Japan. For example, the Portuguese began cooking with cinnamon, imported by spice traders, before anyone else in Europe had discovered its sweet pungency. And of course, as a seafaring nation, all manner of fish and seafood are hallmarks of the Portuguese table.

Maria conceived of a legacy project to preserve and reproduce her Azorean family recipes and foodways. Her original goal was to create a culinary memoir for her three daughters and their children. She understood that culinary culture is fragile, especially in the American ethnic melting pot, and if she wanted her grandchildren to hold on tight to their Azorean heritage, she needed to do something substantial to protect it. She felt it would be an honor to create anew the recipes her mother and grandmother served to friends and family. “Just re-creating that smell! When I make my grandmother’s recipes I am back in her kitchen.”

Maria began her “legacy project” with a vengeance. Cooking, testing, measuring, and tweaking until everything began to taste like home. She also began writing. “Writing is how I deal with grief,” she says. Her legacy project morphed into her first book, and a friend in the printing business suggested that it could be more than a remembrance for her family. It could be a commercial success. Maria ordered up a small run of books from the printer and she learned that everyone at the printing plant wanted one of her books.

Next, Maria got a call from Union Park Press in Boston offering to print and publish the books for sale. She was off and running. The success of that first book energized her to “go down the rabbit hole” with PBS in Rhode Island and film a pilot episode of My Portuguese Kitchen, the first show in their program offerings devoted to Portuguese cooking. The process took four years to bring to screen. Maria had to line up underwriters and sponsors herself. But the series was expertly produced, shot both locally and in Portugal and the Azores. The series was picked up by most PBS stations across the country, garnering an Emmy nomination, among other awards. A second season of My Portuguese Table has just dropped on PBS; if you are longing for a trip to the Azores (and who isn’t?), just dial it up.

The new book, At My Portuguese Table, is a joy. Each recipe reads like you have a friend whispering to you as you try a new dish. Each recipe is introduced by a heartwarming story that places you in the middle of an intimate Azorean family meal. Who cooked it. Who loved it, and why. The recipes are authentic and approachable. And as Maria Lawton says, “food memories are a time machine.”