Pastel de Vouzela: the recipe nobody ever wrote down

The icing sugar lifts off the moment you pick one up. Underneath, the pastry is so thin it folds before it breaks, and you have to carry the pastel flat, like something fragile, if you want the cream to arrive with it.

You will find it almost nowhere but where it was born: Vouzela, a small town in the Beira Alta, in the district of Viseu, in the heart of the Terras de Lafões, between the Serra do Caramulo and the Vouga valley. It is one of central Portugal's best-kept doces, and that is meant literally: the recipe has never been written down for the public.

Two stories, one pastry

The two accounts told in Vouzela disagree about the people, but point to the same place, the convent of Santa Clara in Porto, and the same century, the nineteenth.

In the first, two girls from a well-off Vouzela family, Ana Augusta and Maria da Ascensão, are educated at the convent around the middle of the century. They learn the nuns' pastry work, go home, and pass the knack on to their sisters and cousins. The pastry stays inside a small circle of families, precisely the circle that still makes it.

The second account, the one the town council keeps, is the more novelistic. An orphaned girl is said to have been taken in as a child by nine sisters, two of them nuns at Santa Clara. She is the one who worked out the recipe, to feed fourteen people, the story specifies. A pastry born of a very concrete domestic problem: many at the table, little money, eggs.

Pastry, cream, and nothing on paper

The pastel de Vouzela comes down to three things. A very thin, very light pastry, worked by hand. A doce de ovos, the cream of egg yolks and sugar that signs every piece of Portuguese convent baking. And over it, a veil of icing sugar, laid on at the last moment.

The rest is in the hands. Only a few Vouzela families make it, by craft, and the recipe has never left that circle. This is not a trade secret invented for effect: it is the ordinary condition of a doce that never needed to leave its valley in order to exist. In 2019 it was among the sweets put forward for the district of Viseu in the national 7 Maravilhas Doces de Portugal contest, for many Portuguese the first time they had heard its name.

The wider family of convent sweets

An egg yolk, sugar, barely any pastry: the same grammar returns across the country, convent by convent. Portuguese nuns built an entire craft on egg yolks, for very material reasons, and every house drew its own shape from it.

• In Tentúgal the dough is stretched until it is nearly transparent, giving the pastel de Tentúgal.
• In Chaves it is puff pastry with a savoury filling, and the recipe was bought from a stranger in 1862.
• In Aveiro the same yolks become egg threads that travelled as far as Siam.

The pastel de Vouzela never travelled. It stayed.

What Vouzela eats the rest of the year

The town does not live on its pastel alone. At Easter the folar de Vouzela takes over: a sweet bread of flour, water and eggs, filled with sugar and butter, which godchildren gave to their godparents. And at the fairs you still find a whole open-air doçaria: caladinhos, gemas, raivas, cavacas, passarinhas, beijinhos.

The cavacas deserve a line of their own: those hollow, white-glazed cakes once served as cups. Wine was poured into them, at the tavern and at the festa, and the glass was eaten afterwards. That one detail says more about a Portuguese fair than a long explanation would.

In Brussels

We do not make pastel de Vouzela: it belongs to those few families, and that is as it should be. But the egg-yolk cream inside it is the same one that runs through our counters. You meet it in the pastel de Tentúgal, in the almond eggs, in that whole shelf of doces our Portuguese customers recognise without being told. If you want to understand what we are talking about, the simplest thing is to come in: rue des Tongres in Etterbeek, Stockel, Uccle or Waterloo.

Photo: Paulo Lopes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.