Cape Verdean Recipes
Cape Verdean recipes are grounded in tradition and improvisation, using simple ingredients to create slow-cooked meals and handmade drinks shaped by island life.
Cachupa: The Most Popular Cape Verdean Stew (Recipe)
Cachupa is a typical dish of Cape Verde and has two main types: Cachupa Rica (which translates to rich), made with various types of meat, and Cachupa Pobre (which translates to poor) with fish only. The distinction between the types of Cachupa has to do with the fact that Rica contains meat, which makes the dish more expensive, and only accessible to the better off, while the poor – Pobre – version is more accessible to all.
Jagacida Beans & Rice: The Great Taste and Simple Recipe
Jagacida is a flavorful Cape Verdean dish of rice and beans that showcases the blend of Portuguese and West African influences in the islands’ cuisine.
Cape Verdean Pastel de Atum: Easy Cooking Recipe and Video
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The Best Cape Verdean Recipes
Cape Verdean food and drink recipes are typically passed down through families rather than found in written cookbooks, shaped more by habit than by measurement. Recipes often begin with what’s available — such as dried corn, beans, fish, and root vegetables — and adapt to the household’s taste. A dish like cachupa can take half a day to prepare, starting with soaked hominy corn and layered with pork, sausage, cabbage, and pumpkin, or swapped for fish in coastal areas. Simpler meals, such as xerém (a kind of corn porridge), are often flavoured with just garlic and oil.
On the drink side, making grogue is as much an agricultural process as a culinary one: cane is harvested, crushed, fermented, and distilled in rustic stills. Homemade pontche is a grogue blended with sugar and flavourings — served in reused glass bottles and never quite the same twice.
The recipes reflect local knowledge, patience, and a willingness to make do with what’s at hand. It’s cooking that’s improvised, communal, and meant to be shared.
Rissóis: Simple Recipe for These Tasty Pastries (Video)
Crescent-shaped, breaded rissóis — golden and crisp on the outside, soft and creamy on the inside — are one of the most beloved finger foods across the islands.
Canja de Galinha: The Rich and Delicious Chicken Soup (Video)
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