A pastel de Belém and a pastel de nata are not the same thing in legal terms. "Pastéis de Belém" is a registered trademark and it leaves one address only, Rua de Belém in Lisbon. Every other one, across the rest of the country, is a pastel de nata.
1834
On 30 May 1834 the decree dissolving the religious orders in Portugal was published. It was drafted by Joaquim António de Aguiar, the justice minister, and signed by the regent D. Pedro, Duke of Bragança, in the queen's name. Aguiar was left with the nickname Mata-Frades, the friar killer.
The Mosteiro dos Jerónimos closed. Work on it had begun in 1502, ordered by D. Manuel I, and the monks of the Order of Saint Jerome had held the house for around three centuries. The monastery has been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1983, together with the Torre de Belém.
Next door to the monastery there was a sugar cane refinery with a small shop attached. Someone who came out of the monastery started selling there the sweet pastries that had been made inside it.
1837
The recipe passed to Domingos Rafael Alves, the man who ran the sugar business. In 1837 production began in the buildings attached to the refinery, and the general store turned into a shop selling almost nothing but pastries.
The house has never changed street. The Clarinha family is on its fifth generation: Miguel Clarinha, his father Pedro and his cousin Penélope run the company today.
Belém filled with people arriving by steamboat to see the monastery and the tower. The pastries were sold to those visitors long before tourism existed in the sense we use now.
The trademark
The Pastéis de Belém trademark was registered on 27 April 1918, with the industrial property office of the Ministry of Development.
That puts the distinction beyond flavour. The bakery on the corner may make a better pastry or a worse one, but it cannot call it a pastel de Belém.
Anyone ordering "a Belém" in Alfama is ordering a pastel de nata. Almost all of them do it without knowing.
The Oficina do Segredo
The recipe was never written down to circulate. It is kept in a safe and in the heads of six people: the three master confectioners, Ramiro, Carlos and Vítor, and the three family members in management.
When a new master comes in, the recipe is taught by the previous one, step by step, spoken aloud. The masters sign a confidentiality agreement.
The room where the cream is made is called the Oficina do Segredo, the secret workshop. The house employs around 160 people, some 50 in production and 30 front of house, and makes about 20,000 pastries a day. At weekends that figure can double.
The oven at 400 degrees
There are three ovens, and each one bakes 900 pastries at a time.
The Portuguese Traditional Products record held by the DGADR gives the temperature: 400 degrees, for about 15 minutes. That is a bakery oven working flat out.
It is that heat that scorches the top of the cream and leaves the dark blisters you see on the surface. A domestic oven rarely passes 250 degrees, which is why the home version comes out pale on top even when the flavour is right.
The pastry and the cream
The pastry is about 7 centimetres across. The puff pastry is rolled and pressed into small tins by hand, with the thumb.
The cream takes egg yolks, flour, milk, sugar, water, cinnamon and lemon zest. No preservatives.
The pastry at Belém is thinner and crisper than that of most pastéis de nata, which tend to carry a thicker laminated base.
In the convents, egg whites were used up starching religious habits. Yolks were left over by the dozen, and a good part of Portuguese convent sweet-making comes from that.
Cinnamon, sugar and the right order
Cinnamon and icing sugar are optional. The DGADR record lists them as optional, and the written order is always the same: icing sugar first, cinnamon on top.
The sugar settles on the cream while it is still warm. The cinnamon stays at the surface and it is the first thing the nose picks up.
A pastry straight out of the oven loses quality within hours. The pastry softens and the cream changes. Eating one at the table and eating one from the box two streets away are already two different things.
The bica
Bica is a Lisbon word. In Porto people ask for a cimbalino, after La Cimbali, the Italian machine brand that was imported into Portugal.
A story goes round that bica is an acronym for "Beba Isto Com Açúcar", drink this with sugar. Ciberdúvidas da Língua Portuguesa points to another origin: the bica is the spout the coffee falls from, machine to cup.
The order people in Lisbon follow at the counter is always this one: the pastry first, then the sugar, the cinnamon, and the coffee after. Cold coffee is no use, a warm pastry still is.
Fado ao Carmo has two fado houses in Lisbon, in Chiado and in Alfama, with different menus and Portuguese desserts. Tables can be booked here.