Because I had run out of decent places to eat a Brettljause in Austria, I boarded a plane and flew to Madeira, Portugal.
This is a complete lie, of course (about running out of Brettljause places, not about Madeira), but if I had wanted to continue lying, I would have said something like, “Having spent four days desperately trying to find a Brettljause on Madeira, I took a ferry to Porto Santo.” While Madeira is a popular holiday destination for Portuguese, Porto Santo is the place where Madeirans go for their holidays. Mere 43 kilometers away from the main island, Porto Santo still requires 2.5 hours to reach with a boat, which for me anyway sounds much safer than 20 minutes by plane.
The guidebook I had bought before my travel had stated quite clearly that although Porto Santo can be experienced as a day trip, two or three days are highly recommended to get into the “island’s spirit.” The relaxed life of the island became obvious to me early on, as having arrived in the village that was supposed to be the island’s capital, I still had more than three hours to waste before the next bus tour. Without thinking long, I jumped into a taxi with a driver who didn’t speak English, let her take me to a hiking trail, hiked for two hours and then managed to call her to pick me up and deliver to the starting point just 30 seconds before the bus’s departure.
Needless to mention, the tour guide didn’t speak English either, and at one point during the journey delivered a whole 15-minute speech about the quality of the island’s sand in Portuguese. (I know it was about the stupid sand only thanks to Google Translate that I eventually turned on.) Because of the delay, the bus returned to the “capital” too late, leaving me mere 45 minutes to find something to eat and run to catch another bus back to the ferry.
That’s when I found Tábua Rasa and its Brettljause. I had big reservations about Madeira’s ability to come up with Brettljausen (the island hardly has any pigs, to start with), but the dish was amazingly similar to its Austrian relatives, the wooden plank included! What was different was the presence of various dried fruits (which certainly added to the exoticism) and sweetish cookies instead of bread (some crunchy flatbreads were also provided).
The Speck was a bit too chewy, and the salami, though tasty, had a strange bright pink color, but anyway, the dish was dominated by cheeses. All of them were excellent, but the goat cheese exceeded all my expectations. The cheese went particularly well with the jam provided in a separate glass jar. I think it had “abóbora” written on it, which would mean pumpkin, but it tasted like a spiced mix of honey and oranges.
I would have loved to stay at Tábua Rasa for half an hour longer and thoroughly savor each ingredient of this Brettljause while looking at the ocean, but alas, I had to rush again. Still, this tábua remains one of my good memories of Porto Santo and Madeira in general.
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