The book Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa, by Maria de Lourdes Modesto, was released in January 1982 by Verbo publishing house.[1]

It is the best-selling Portuguese cookbook of all time and can be found in thousands of homes.[1]

A television contest in 1961

Maria de Lourdes Modesto joined RTP on May 15, 1958, and for twelve years, she hosted the live program Culinária.[1]
She primarily cooked French cuisine, which led to complaints from viewers.

"Viewers began, well, to complain and demand that I cook traditional Portuguese cuisine."[2]

Every time she made a traditional dish, she would receive mail saying that her aunt didn't make it that way, that grandmother's recipe used something else, or that in the writer's hometown, it was done differently. There was no single version that could be called a version.

The response was to pose the question back to the country.
In 1961, she promoted the Regional Portuguese Cooking and Pastry Contest on television, organized with the National Information Secretariat.
She asked people for the recipes from their regions, their homes, and their families.[3]

3,181 came in, some handwritten, others typed, all with the name and address of the sender.[1][4]
The original collection still exists, preserved by the Associação dos Cozinheiros Profissionais de Portugal, and is available online, organized by region.
You can go there to see the recipes that didn't make it into the book.

Twenty years passed between the collection and the book

Twenty-one years passed between the contest and the publication. It took three years to compile the book.[2]
The other eighteen:

"That was the time I spent courting that material. (…) The way they responded to me was always so rich, so emotional, that it scared me more and more each time."[2]

On the original index cards, her notes remained:

"Missing quantities",

"Write or call this lady to see if the recipe doesn't call for sugar in the dough",

"Speak to D. Mª Eugénia".[1]

She wrote and called for years.
She compared versions of the same dish, sought to find out which were local and which had been copied from old books, and noted her findings:
"Not copied",
"Gathered information, it is authentic and very typical in the Portalegre district",
"It's good. In Coimbra, when I was little, they used to make this".[1]

In the preface, she left written what these notes reveal:
"the precision of mathematical formulas has no place in traditional cooking".[1]

The book, in 1982

The book was released in January 1982, with 336 pages, regional texts by António Manuel Couto Viana,
photographs by Augusto Cabrita and Homem Cardoso, and layout by Sebastião Rodrigues.
It cost 900 escudos.[1]
The Diário de Lisboa featured the cover on January 16, with the title "Twenty years gathering centuries of recipes".[5]

It was the first Portuguese cookbook organized by country regions, including Madeira and the Azores[1].
That organizational decision still dictates how the book is used today.

It sold over 400,000 copies, is now in its 24th edition, and had an English edition in 1989.[1]

She passed away on July 19, 2022, at the age of 92.[6]

The same method, minus 3,181 envelopes

If you own the book, your task today is to pick a region and read the entire index before cooking whatever it is.
If you don't, it is an edition that can still be found and one that lasts a lifetime.

And if what you have at home is your grandmother's notebook, or a handful of loose sheets in someone's handwriting who is no longer with us, the method is the same as the one Maria de Lourdes Modesto used:
gather everything in one place, ask about quantities while there is still someone to ask, and write down the origin of each recipe beside it.
That was exactly what transformed 3,181 envelopes into a book.

Preserve your family's recipes in your Culinari,
with the quantities and the origin of each, ready to one day become a book.

Sources

1. Maria Margarida Abreu, Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa de Maria de Lourdes Modesto: contributos
   para a construção das identidades e do património culinário
   português, master's dissertation in Gastronomic Sciences, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, 2018.
   It is the most comprehensive study existing on this book, and the source of most of the data and
   citations gathered here: the entry into RTP, the contest, the notes on the original cards, the preface
   and the technical sheet of the 1st edition (January 1982), and the sales figures.
2. "Maria de Lourdes Modesto. 'Cozinhados era uma coisa a que eu não achava graça
   nenhuma'",
   interview with Tiago Pais, Observador, July 31, 2016 - the three years of work, the twenty years of waiting, and the viewers' reaction to French cuisine.
3. "Maria de Lourdes Modesto: 'Não sou contra a inovação na cozinha, sou contra o
   disparate'",
   interview with Marta Cerqueira, Jornal Sol, October 10, 2017 - the origin of the contest
   (the year, 1961, comes from Maria Margarida Abreu's dissertation).
4. Collection of the original recipes received in 1961, Associação dos Cozinheiros Profissionais de
   Portugal.
5. Diário de Lisboa, no. 20754, year 61, saturday cover, January 16 of
   1982, "Vinte anos a recolher
   séculos de receitas". The piece is on page 11 of the same edition, titled "«Cozinha
   Tradicional Portuguesa» um livro que é um pitéu". Archive of the Fundação Mário Soares e Maria
   Barroso / Ruella Ramos collection.
6. "Maria de Lourdes Modesto, the 'diva' of Portuguese
   cuisine, has died",
   Público, July 19, 2022.