“Rice is a big part of Louisiana culture,” says Emeril Lagasse, the mega chef, TV host, and adopted native son of New Orleans. “And it goes beyond jambalaya. We eat a lot of rice. We grow it. I sometimes tell people there are forty-nine states and then there’s Louisiana, because it’s like no other.”
But long before Lagasse ladled his first bowl of red beans and rice, he ate and absorbed the rice culture of Portugal, fed to him by his mother, Hilda, who hailed from the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic. Growing up in the Portuguese-American enclave of Fall River, Massachusetts, the young Lagasse ate Hilda’s arroz de galinha, a.k.a. chicken rice, and rice studded with chouriço (pork sausage) and parsley.
Rice first arrived in Portugal in the eighth century from Northern Africa, with the Moorish conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. (Arroz derives from the Arabic word ’arúzz.) Over millennia, the grain became inseparable from Portuguese cuisine, and the country’s cooks built a repertoire of rice dishes: baked with octopus, simmered with salt cod, served soupy with razor clams. Even now, the Portuguese eat thirty-five-plus pounds of rice per year—four times the amount of their European compatriots.
Lagasse’s current home, the Bayou State, is indeed America’s third largest grower of rice, and its farmers seed their flooded rice fields with crawfish, that iconic crustacean that grows in symbiosis with the crop. In the months between the rice and mudbug harvest, sportsmen wait in blinds on fields’ edges and levies, ready to shoot migratory ducks.
Last fall, these cultures met when Lagasse opened 34, his first-ever Portuguese restaurant, in New Orleans’ Warehouse District. Servers there pile tables with conservas (tinned fish), Hilda’s rustic caldo verde, salt cod fritters, halibut cataplana, and piri piri chicken. There’s also, of course, rice, generously portioned and designed to share.
Creamy and rich arroz de lagosta, or lobster rice, hails from chef de cuisine Chris Dos Reis’s coastal hometown of Nazaré, known for its monster surfing waves. A paella topped with rabbit sausage and Gulf shrimp is a kissing cousin to the Spanish version, complete with a crunchy layer of socarrat. Then there’s arroz de pato, a dish that would feel just as natural at a Louisiana hunting camp as it does at Lagasse’s sleek, 245-seat restaurant.
Traditionally, arroz de pato combines braised duck meat, often wild, with chouriço, rice, duck stock, and aromatics. Home cooks pour the mélange into a clay pot or casserole and bake it until crispy. To adapt it for restaurant service and maximize its flavor, Lagasse simmers duck legs in port and orange juice until they’re tender enough to “tear with two forks,” hits the meat with a pop of sherry vinegar, and piles it into a cazuela, a shallow clay baking dish. On top goes a layer of Agulha rice that has rollicked in chouriço fat and then plumped in duck or chicken stock. (Lagasse sources the long-grain Portuguese rice and sausage from Portugalia Marketplace.) At last, the dish hits the oven to achieve a golden crust. Pro tip: “Take an egg yolk, beat it, drizzle it on top, and then put it in the oven,” Lagasse says.
The chef adds: “At 34, rice is on every other table. It just makes a meal complete.”
