Madeira’s Pé de Cabra Cocktail Is an Unlikely Island Staple

It began as a breakfast drink. A toddler’s breakfast drink, to be exact.

“You see, once I was in class, my mom used to make me a breakfast of black beer [stout] with uncooked egg yolks,” says Carlos Freitas, the proprietor of Pé-de-Cabra, a bar on the Portuguese island of Madeira.

Carlos’ bar sits on the fringe of a cliff overlooking a panorama that’s each industrial—Coral, the island’s flagship brewery is just under—and rural, with impossibly steep hills blanketed with banana bushes extending all the best way to the Atlantic Ocean. He explains that the house was once a mercearia, or small store. Prior to now, it was typical for Madeira’s family-run groceries to additionally perform as casual bars: bins of potatoes, onions and rice on one aspect, and a tiny counter the place beers and wine had been poured on the opposite. As a twin shopkeeper-barkeeper, Carlos says his father would play with drink concepts, finally opting so as to add chocolate and native wine to his son’s childhood breakfast drink, calling it Pé de Cabra, which interprets to “goat leg” in Portuguese but additionally which means “crowbar.”

“He known as it crowbar as a result of it will probably do something, it provides you energy. You recognize what I imply?” Assuming I didn’t know what he meant, he leaned in shut: “If a pair sits right here, and the person has a Pé de Cabra and the girl additionally has a Pé de Cabra, for certain later, they are going to have intercourse. That’s the ability of the drink.”

Carlos’ father died in 1987, leaving him with a store he didn’t essentially need to run. It was additionally throughout this time that Madeira’s mercearias had been struggling, unable to compete with the newfangled idea of supermarkets.

“Within the previous days, folks wouldn’t pay with money,” Carlos tells me. “They’d have an account and pay on the finish of the week. However I didn’t like doing that—that was my father’s means of doing issues.”

Carlos determined to desert the grocery idea altogether, rebranding the house as a bar. He modernized his father’s drink, eradicating the egg yolks and frothing the elements—native stout, candy Madeira wine, cocoa powder and sugar—with an immersion blender, and serving it over ice with a swath of lemon peel. He named the bar Pé-de-Cabra after the drink and inadvertently grew to become a pioneer. At this time, the drink is served throughout Madeira, usually from former groceries that in any other case may need died out.

Uninterested in speaking historical past, Carlos insists on making me a Pé de Cabra—my first. I’m anticipating one thing sugary and cloying, however as a substitute I’m stunned to seek out the drink refreshing: subtly candy, aromatic and barely bitter, the disparate elements having merged into one thing else completely, one thing that goes down simply. 

“You’re going to love that; it’ll provide you with energy,” Carlos assures me.

Just a few miles away, the facade of Os Castrinhos boasts an enormous crowbar and an indication that reads Taberna e Mercearia, “Tavern and Grocery Retailer.” Step inside, nevertheless, and there’s no signal of the store that when existed right here. It’s solely a bar today, one which’s grow to be arguably Madeira’s most well-known vacation spot for Pé de Cabra. 

I order a glass, and draft Coral stout, bottled chocolate milk, candy Madeira wine and sugar are poured right into a pitcher and processed with an immersion blender together with just a few cubes of ice. The drink that outcomes is sufficient to fill a pint glass, and is good and wealthy—virtually milkshake-like. The place Os Castrinhos excels is in its dentinhos, small dishes which can be served with drinks on Madeira. Typically, these are so simple as a small bowl of peanuts or lupin beans, however over the course of a pair visits to the bar I used to be given a dish of macaroni in a tangy tomato sauce with greens and chouriço, a Madeiran staple; porco vinha d’alhos, cubes of fatty pork braised with garlic and wine, a dish that’s considered the inspiration for India’s vindaloo; and a small plate of braised veal tripe. 

I ask Anselmo, Os Castrinhos’ third-generation proprietor, when he made the shift to working solely as a bar, and he tells me that it was round 1995. “Supermarkets led to the disappearance of small outlets. We couldn’t compete with their costs,” he explains. The transition appears to have labored properly for Os Castrinhos, which is likely one of the bigger bars on the island, boasting indoor and out of doors seating, big flat-screen TVs and a drinks menu that goes past Pé de Cabra to incorporate issues like import beers and the Nikita, a hand-blended mixture of ice cream, pineapple and beer.

To strive the drink at one of many island’s nonetheless extant grocery store-bar hybrids, I head to Machico, a captivating seaside city in Madeira’s southeastern nook. Bar da Chupa, perched on a nondescript roundabout simply exterior town middle, is an area cramped with bins filled with produce, cabinets loaded with cooking staples and snacks in equal measure. Clear plastic baggage hold from the ceiling holding tubes of toothpaste and packages of toothpicks, and, off to at least one aspect, a small bar. 

I order a Pé de Cabra, and the proprietor pours a tiny bottle of Coral stout, a glug of pink desk wine from a field, cocoa powder and a beneficiant quantity of sugar into an aluminum pitcher. She grabs a caralhinho, the wood whisk-like instrument historically used to combine drinks on Madeira, and manually whips the elements to a purple froth, pouring the drink over just a few cubes of ice and a swath of lemon peel. 

It’s round 5 p.m., and as I sip, locals begin to file in, the overwhelming majority additionally ordering Pés de Cabra. I ask a person standing on the bar why he ordered the drink and never merely a glass of wine or beer.

“This has wine!” is his enthusiastic response. “And beer as properly!” 

A gateway to a snack or some last-minute purchasing, an aphrodisiac, at one level in historical past even breakfast for the youngsters: It’s then that I understand that the Pé de Cabra can do or be absolutely anything.