Fired up in New Bedford

Backyard barbecue can't hold a flame to Portuguese feast

Susan Amaral of New Bedford sipped sangria opening night at the weekend-long Feast of the Blessed Sacrament festival. (Christine Hochkeppel for The Boston Globe)

NEW BEDFORD - In the realm of outdoor cooking, there are grills, there are barbecue pits, and there are campfires.

And then there is the carne de espeto pavilion at the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, a fire pit that, like the feast itself, must be seen to be believed: A 40-foot, waist-high bed of scorching lava rock, lit from above by multicolored lights and lined with brick, slate, and a wall of people wielding 6-foot skewers of sirloin.

From Thursday evening, when the 94th feast began, to its close at midnight tomorrow, tens of thousands of people a day will have passed through the bayberry-lined arches and joined an event that bills itself as the world's largest Portuguese feast and New England's largest ethnic festival.

Some come for religion, to see old friends, or for food they can't get elsewhere - rabbit stew, marinated goat, spiced codfish. Others come for this morning's road race or for the beauty queens, brass bands, and classic cars that will roll down Acushnet Avenue in tomorrow's parade. Many come just to mill about, elbow-to-elbow, on a few acres of fenced-in pavement in New Bedford's North End, drinking beer and Madeiran wine as music plays from three stages.

Thousands, though, would come even if the feast offered nothing but the carne de espeto, or meat on a spit - for the taste and the experience of skewering and roasting their own meal.

"The meat's what brings me back," said Brent Courchene, 28, of Fairhaven.

Backyard barbecue? "Forget about it. We've got the real thing here, and we just hang out all night," said Debora Coelho, a New Bedford city councilor. "Open flames, let's do it."

The pit attracts all kinds, each with their own preparation and cooking methods. The cubed meat is sold raw in baggies at $8 per pound, plus a $10 deposit for the spit.

Tools in hand, feast-goers head to a stainless-steel prep area to dust or rub their meat in a coarse-salt blend, which smells of garlic, shows traces of bay leaf and crushed pepper, and has a few secret spices.

"The guy who makes it won't even tell us what's in it," said Edward Camara Jr., a member of the Clube Madeirense SS Sacramento, the fraternal organization that oversees the feast. Members raise more than $100,000 for scholarships and charitable donations in New Bedford and Madeira, the autonomous Portuguese island from which all of the club's roughly 325 members trace their heritage.

On the first night of the feast, I sidled up to the salting bay next to a leathery-skinned man in a sleeveless Harley-Davidson shirt, who was jamming meat cubes onto his skewer. Meanwhile, he was keeping an eye on the guy to his left in tasseled loafers and tucked-in golf shirt, who had brought an orange bell pepper from home and was placing slices between the meat just so. "Waddaya got?" the first guy asked. "Flowers on there?"

I was introduced to the feast a few years ago, and I never forgot the fire pit. In my mind's eye, I could see the heat waves dancing, the juice running off the skewer, the diversity of the crowd. And of course, I could taste the meat: tender, flavorful, whether eaten by hand or stuffed inside a Portuguese roll.

But I had forgotten a few things, most importantly that you shouldn't grab the skewer while it's over the heat. Blame it on trying to take notes, grill, and negotiate tight quarters simultaneously, but I reached for the steel, instead of the wooden handle, and felt a sudden pain.

I put down the skewer, tucked my notebook under an arm, and went to the meat stand, a welt rising on my left hand. Frederico Correia, a club member who came over from Madeira in 1970, gave me an icy can of Sumol, a Portuguese soft drink, to numb the pain.

Even with the burn, the meat tasted great. But like others I saw, I'd poured Madeiran wine over the simmering steak as a marinade. Camara shook his head. "Rookie mistake," he said.

According to Camara, the wine burns off immediately. Beer, on the other hand, causes the meat to roast slower, he insisted. He led the way out of the headquarters and back to the pit to demonstrate.

First, Camara skewered the meat a precise few millimeters apart, for even cooking. Then he revealed an underhand salting technique, shaking from below to avoid overdoing it. At the pit, he doused the meat in beer, let it cook three minutes, flicked the spit handle to shake excess salt, and turned it.

As Camara slid the meat off the skewer, Don Neves, president of this year's feast committee, came over and eyed his handiwork. Whether it's the camaraderie, the music, the culture, or the food, Neves said, "there's things here you can't get anywhere else."

By 11:30 p.m., the main stage was empty, the crowd dissipating. But scores still milled near the pit, drinking and dancing to traditional Madeiran songs.

An outsized man in a Venice Beach shirt drizzled beer onto his sizzling steak. A few others sipped wine. Nobody poured it on the meat.

Eric Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com.