Pastéis de Nata

Pastéis de nata are Portugal's beloved custard tarts: cups of crisp, blistered, paper-thin puff pastry filled with a silky egg-yolk custard baked at ferocious heat until the top scorches into dark caramel freckles. Eaten just warm, ideally dusted with cinnamon and a little powdered sugar, the contrast is everything — shattering, buttery layers against a soft, barely-set, faintly burnt custard.

In Lisbon's Belém district the original is sold under the protected name pastéis de Belém; everywhere else in Portugal and around the world they are pastéis de nata. They are the default companion to a morning bica (espresso) and one of Portugal's most successful culinary exports, now baked from Macau to São Paulo to London. Planning a trip? See our Lisbon travel guide for the best pastelarias in the city.

The tart was born of monastery economy. Before the 19th century, convents and monasteries across Portugal used vast quantities of egg whites to starch nuns' habits and to clarify wine, leaving mountains of surplus yolks — which were turned into an entire genre of rich, yolk-heavy conventual sweets. At the Jerónimos Monastery in Belém, monks created the custard tart that would become famous.

When the Liberal Revolution led to the dissolution of Portugal's religious orders in 1834, the monastery's monks, seeking income, sold their secret recipe to a nearby sugar refinery. In 1837 the owners opened the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém, which still operates today and still guards the original recipe, known to only a handful of pastry chefs. Those tarts may legally be called pastéis de Belém; the same broad recipe made everywhere else takes the generic name pastéis de nata. Portuguese traders and emigrants carried the tart across the former empire, which is why a near-identical custard tart turns up in Macau (and from there across East Asia), Goa and Brazil.