Filhós and sonhos: two fried balls, two doughs, one Portuguese Christmas

They are golden, slightly lumpy, dusted with sugar and cinnamon, and you take them with your fingertips from a dish in the middle of the table. In Portugal at Christmas, these fried balls go by two names: filhó and sonho. Plenty of people mix them up. They are not the same thing, though, and the difference fits in a single phrase: the dough rises, or it does not.

Two fried sweets, one season

Filhós and sonhos belong to the quadra natalícia, the Christmas season. Both are small balls of dough dropped into boiling oil, lifted out golden and rolled in sugar. On a Portuguese table in December they sit next to rice pudding, aletria and the rest of the festive desserts. The eye barely tells them apart. The palate notices at once.

The sources we consulted, including the Portuguese Wikipedia pages for each of the two, agree on what separates them: the filhó is a yeasted dough, the sonho a simple one. We stick to that distinction, the only one these sources state clearly.

The sonho: a dough that asks for one saucepan

The sonho de Natal, or simply sonho, is made with milk, lemon zest, salt, wheat flour, eggs and oil for frying. The milk is boiled with the zest, the flour goes in, it cools a little, then the eggs are added. The result is a thick dough, close to the one used for choux pastry.

Then spoonfuls of dough are dropped into hot oil. They turn into balls, and the same source notes a detail worth keeping: while frying, sonhos usually turn over by themselves. They are served dusted with sugar, with sugar and cinnamon, or covered in syrup.

The name makes a promise: once fried, the sonho becomes a small hollow fritter, light and slightly crisp, something that feels almost unreal. In Portuguese, a sonho is simply a dream.

The filhó: a dough that takes its time

The filhó is made of flour and eggs, sometimes with pumpkin and orange zest, and fried in olive oil before being dusted with sugar and cinnamon. Its dough is risen, as we saw: it has to rest and swell before it goes into the oil. That waiting time is what sets it apart from the sonho, which can be made much faster.

At Christmas it is found above all in the interior and the north of Portugal, and it goes by other names depending on the place: velhoz, fritos or bolos fritos, literally fried cakes. It also exists in north-eastern Brazil, where the Portuguese carried it.

As for the word, Wikipedia links it to the Latin foliola, «small leaf», like the Galician filloa, a close relative across the border. That is an etymological lead, not a certainty, and we present it as such.

Pumpkin, carrot, apple: the variations

The basic recipe lends itself to additions. Depending on the household, pumpkin, carrot or apple goes into the dough. The sonhos de abóbora, made with pumpkin, are among the best known. Every family keeps its own version and its own knack, which is exactly what makes these fritters a dish of memory more than of recipe: you eat them the way you ate them at home.

We have no reliable birth date to give for either one, and no town that claims them. Better to say so than to build an origin that would sound good.

In Brussels, at Wooly

These fritters are eaten at home, at the family table, and we do not claim to have them on our menu. But the Portuguese Christmas table is recognisable by this mix of sweets: a little frying, a little cream, a lot of eggs. In Brussels, our shops in Etterbeek (rue des Tongres), Stockel, Uccle and Waterloo live on the pastel de nata, whose cream is made with egg yolks. All four addresses are on the page Portuguese pastry shop in Brussels.

Photo : Adriao, Wikimedia Commons, licence CC BY-SA 4.0.