Vegetables and salad
Accompanying nearly every dish will be potatoes, either fried or roast in the case of most meat dishes or boiled if you’ve ordered fish. The distinction is less marked in tourist resorts on the Algarve and elsewhere, but trying to get chips to come with your grilled trout or salmon in a rural town simply invites incomprehension – fish comes with boiled potatoes and that’s that. Most dishes are also served with a helping of rice and salad. Other vegetables occasionally make an appearance, like carrots, cabbage or broccoli, usually boiled to within an inch of their lives – a more interesting choice is grelos (turnip tops), often turned into a purée, while winter and early spring is the time for chestnuts (castanhas), which appear in soups and stuffings. Salad is the more common accompaniment to every meal; a salada mista is a simple mixed salad of lettuce, tomatoes and onions.