I can’t take the credit for the delicious combination of ingredients in this spice: it all goes to my grandmother. She left the Azores in the late 1800’s and settled in Martha’s Vineyard, bringing with her all the Portuguese recipes that made her such a culinary treasure to our large family.
She showed my mother how to combine the ingredients and my mother passed the gift to me. I bottled it up for a few friends who wanted to “spice up” their kitchen, and soon they all returned with empty bottles and were asking for a refill. I’m a schoolteacher, but when I wasn’t correcting papers or tutoring, I was filling bottles – eventually selling four hundred in one day at a crafts fair. The overwhelming reaction of everyone who tasted it confirmed what I’d secretly known all along: it just makes everything taste better.
So add a dash or two of Mama Stella’s seasoning to your favorite dish and see for yourself why this spice has been the secret ingredient of three generations of our family’s home cooking.
But hurry up. One bottle won’t last long.