This is a real francesinha, consumed this evening. Accept no substitutes!

Recently, I came across an article about the francesinha, Porto’s signature sandwich, in the food section of the website Atlas Obscura. I called it out for being fake.

Fake? But the francesinha is a messy pile of ingredients cloaked in melted cheese, you may be saying, how does one identify real from fake?

Let’s examine the differences, starting with the stock Photo used in the Atlas Obscura article to illustrate the francesinha. Here it is, followed by rows of other photos of francesinhas. (I can only link to the picture — I don’t want to buy it!) As you can see, the stock photo used is the odd one out, currently. It’s as if someone staged this photo in a studio using a list of ingredients and presented it as a typical francesinha, but nobody checked to see if this is how it’s actually made.

Me: “No self-respecting purveyor of Francesinha prepares it like this. The cheese, meat, sauce, it’s all wrong…”

• The cheese in the stock photo is a strange shade of orange. I know the cheese looks orange in the photo above, but that’s because the sauce was poured over it (which also melts it) and the orange tinge is from the sauce. Not in the stock photo, though.
• The meats aren’t cut properly, and the photo shows only three different kinds of meat when there are usually around five.
• The worst part is the sauce: it is totally wrong. The stock photo sauce looks like broth, not the francesinha sauce which is made with beer, spices, and tomatoes.

For the record, the Atlas Obscura article is more or less correct in its description and history of Porto’s iconic sandwich. But they could’ve easily used a better photo to accompany it, and instead chose one that presented the ingredients well but was the furthest off the reality mark.

I’ve eaten plenty of francesinhas in Porto, enough to spot a real one, and the one in the article definitely isn’t one of them.

To view more francesinhas from the archives, click the tag: https://gailatlarge.com/blog/tag/francesinha

(The photo above is from today at Restaurante Universal in Porto.)

March 22, 2018
Album: Portugal [Spring 2018]

For more posts/photos of Portuguese food and drink:

https://gailatlarge.com/blog/tag/portuguese-kitchen
https://www.pinterest.pt/gailatlarge/portuguese-food-drink/
https://www.instagram.com/gailatlarge/ (see Stories)

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