How We Started
My mother-in-law lit this oven for the first time in 1998, in the yard behind our house in Assagao, because the village poder had stopped his rounds and she refused to eat bread from a packet.
Word got around before the bread even cooled. Twenty-something years on, the yard is still here, the oven's older and slower, and we still light it by hand at four every morning — coconut husk first, then the good wood.
Everything you'll find on the board is what came out of it today. Nothing's frozen, nothing's trucked in, and when we're out, we're out.
If the oven's cold, I'm not awake yet.— Tia Rosa