https://scroll.in/article/1002638/in-goas-delectable-pasteis-de-nata-trend-a-state-serves-up-a-taste-of-its-cosmopolitan-history

Earlier this year, as Goa lurched its way in and out of the most slipshod
Covid-19 lockdowns imaginable, where everything was open while the
authorities pretended not to notice, an unmistakable frisson of glee passed
through my home town of Panjim about the brand new – and very quickly
super-busy - Padaria Prazeres (the word Padaria means bakery in Portuguese).

Part of the excitement is because the young owners are hometown
born-and-bred. 29-year-old Chef Ralph Prazeres worked in top kitchens in
Europe – including a stage at Noma in Copenhagen, often rated the best
restaurant in the world – before returning with his wife, Stacy Gracias, to
open this cheery, sparkling bakery/café just across the road from his
ancestral home in Caranzalem, near Miramar beach.

The main cause for the buzz, however, was that Padaria Prazeres makes it
easy to access oven-warm pastéis de nata. To be sure, these deeply
addictive egg-and-custard pastry tarts, which catapulted from their
traditional origins in Lisbon to become an astonishingly widespread global
phenomenon, are not entirely unknown in this part of the world. The
outstanding “Goa-inspired” Mumbai restaurant O Pedro has them on the menu,
and different people in India’s smallest state have ventured small-batch
production over the years. But we are talking about another scale of supply
altogether now, and the demand has been incessant.

“The pastéis de nata at Padaria Prazeres are perfect” says Inês Figueira,
the Director of Fundação Oriente’s  delegation in India, which serves as a
cultural bridge between Portugal and India with a focus on preserving
Luso-Indian heritage. This native of Lisbon told me, “every time you have a
first bite of a pastel de nata you go on a sugar high that obviously makes
you smile, but after that you start automatically finding bridges with your
memories in terms of presentation, consistency, smell, and flavour. Padaria
Prazeres pastéis de nata ticked all the right boxes! The problem is that
you can never have one only.”

Figueira remembers when these little pastries were exclusively Lisboeta,
with the main supply coming from a 19th century landmark bakery/café in
Belém, the ancient riverside district that is famous for being the site
from where Vasco da Gama set off on his voyage of discovery to India (with
delicious irony and knowing intent, Charles Correa brought the cultural
connection full circle in the 21st century with his masterpiece
Champalimaud Centre of the Unknown right next to that spot).

Also here is Jerónimos Monastery, the formal centrepiece of Portuguese
identity, where tombs of the royals (resting on carved elephants signifying
their India connection) share space with the sarcophagi of Vasco da Gama,
the national poets Camões (who wrote most of his best work in Goa) and
Pessoa, and many other luminaries. This is where the story of pastéis de
nata begins - like very many talismanic European epicurean luxuries –
derived from the needs, tastes and predilections of religious orders with
lots of time on their hands, and unlimited resources to experiment.

Like most Christian congregations of the era, the Hieronymite monks of the
Order of St. Jerome, and the nuns who worked with them, used huge
quantities of egg whites to starch their cassocks, wimples, robes and
habits. This left yolks to dispose, with thick yellow custard an obvious
option (interestingly, in Goa, the same “problem” in the 16th century
Convent of Santa Monica led to the creation of the famous many-layered
bebinca). At some point, the monks and nuns became especially fond of flaky
little tartlets made with yolk-heavy egg custard, and when the Liberal
Revolution of 1820 swept away all aristocratic patronage, they began to
raise funds by selling their beloved Pastéis de Belém from the provisions
store attached to a nearby sugar refinery.

That initial surge of anti-clericalism was sustained. The religious orders
faced dissolution. In 1834, the Hieronymites were expelled from their
monastery. At that point, the owners of the sugar refinery purchased the
secret recipe (which is still closely guarded) and opened Fábrica de
Pastéis de Belém, which has stayed in continuous operation ever since.
Always beloved within Lisbon, it became transformed with the pivot to
tourism that Portugal initiated in the 1970s. Today, it is an essential
pit-stop for every visitor, which – before the Covid-19 pandemic rearranged
the economic landscape – is geared to sell at least 20,000 custard tarts
every single day.

“Pastéis de nata are definitely part of every Lisboner imaginary,” says
Figueira. “Every once in a while, you would have one with your espresso,
and when in the neighborhood would definitely not miss a visit to Pastéis
de Belém. Then, after tourism saw its first real boom in the 1990s, pastéis
de nata became a national symbol, and with it came the enormous lines at
the original shop, culinary contests between different pastry chefs in
town, and the internationalisation of pastel de nata as the ultimate
Portuguese delicacy.”

In 2011, the public of Portugal was asked to vote for the Seven Wonders of
Gastronomy. They enshrined the classic Caldo Verde soup, Alheira de
Mirandela (chicken and bread sausage), the marvellous sheep’s milk cheese
Queijo Serra da Estrela, the ubiquitous grilled sardines and Arroz de
Marisco seafood rice, roast suckling pig and, no drumroll required, the
Pasteis de Belém. Immediately afterwards, the genial Fado singer Leonel
Moura debuted his musical ode to “the king of pastries, the best friend of
little coffees.”





*Vai à mesa do freguêsServido em salva de prataEsse vaidoso burguêsÉ nobre,
é portuguêsO belo pastel de nata *
[https://youtu.be/nML_NipTBtw]

Those were the worst years of sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone, and
Portugal was amongst the hardest hit. In 2012, the economy was still
shrinking, and the country’s public debt was an astonishing 124% of its
GDP. There was a wave of bankruptcies, and unemployment soared to 16%. In
the midst of this wrenching social emergency, the country’s Minister of
Economy and Labour, Álvaro Santos Pereira famously mused that pasteis de
nata could help pull the country out of recession.

What’s preventing us from taking these delicious pastries global, Santos
Pereira asked his country’s business community. He pointed to the success
of Nando’s – the fast-food chicken franchise founded in South Africa that
is based on a recipe from Mozambique – and urged thinking on similar lines.
“We never managed to export this speciality of ours,” he said, “it has not
been a national goal and we have never committed ourselves to it. We have
to change that.”

Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the following decade has seen the
unstoppable romp of pastéis de nata around the world. There is the Nata
Festival in London. A tiny bakery in Coloane on the outskirts of Macau has
seen its quirky British-Chinese version explode to regional popularity.
Hundreds of millions are sold each year across China and Taiwan at –
believe it or not – KFC. Inevitably, there are companies like Nata Pura
which make different flavours: macchiato, passion-fruit, salted caramel.

“Think Instagram,” says Vikram Doctor, who is - in my view - the country's
best writer on food, and recently transplanted himself to live in India’s
smallest state. “I think, like with many other trending foods at the
moment, one can ask how much is due to the fact that they work well on
social media. Pastéis de nata are neatly individual sized (no cutting and
easy to hold) and have a lovely golden filling that looks good onscreen.
They are also best eaten hot, so I know abroad there's a whole tradition of
waiting in line for the fresh ones, which is always a good marketing tool.”

In the past five years, Goa has become irredeemably trendy – an unreal 10
of the top 50 restaurants in Conde Nast Traveller’s India rankings are here
(disclosure: I am one of very many jurors). Among many other highlights,
there’s great Russian food made by Russians, Thai restaurants run by
natives of Thailand, the only genuinely Iranian restaurant in India and
arguably the best Burmese restaurant in the world.

That degree of cosmopolitanism is nothing new in Goa. As Doctor notes,
“it's always been a fascinating place for food since its connection to the
larger Portuguese colonial world gave it access to different flora (and
fauna, like Jahangir's turkey). And what's also interesting is that this
hasn't stopped, because Goa's current international connections range from
the hippies to shippies who pick up seeds on their travels. I had some
luscious yellow watermelons this summer, grown by a shippie on his farm,
and that struck me as so Goa. Mumbai has shippies, but they don't have
farms!”

Alongside the constant turnover of new restaurants manned by chefs from
around the world who want to work in Goa, there’s also an ambitious set of
forays into the roots and permutations of traditional food by a younger
generation of ambitious locals. These include Avinash Tavares of Cavatina -
by far the best restaurant in South Goa - and the brilliant Pablo Miranda.
Also excellent are the seafood specialists Kismoor and the purist
home-cooking of Elvis Victor (and his Mummy) at MumMai.

Doctor says that “unfortunately, the identification for tourism purposes of
Goan Catholic food with Goan food has done it no favours. There's a
simplified, even caricaturised version of Goan Catholic food which has
become widely available. It over emphasises just a couple of spice pastes,
pushes muscle meats and expensive fish to the fore, overdoes the vinegar
and chillies and is just pretty awful all around. Sadly, this is the sort
of food most people visiting Goa will encounter – Vir Sanghvi’s recent
column is proof - and it’s why I'm so glad I'm able to encounter Goan food
as a resident rather than a tourist.”

When it comes to Padaria Prazeres – which he has not yet tried – Doctor
says, “I think the growth of bakeries is great, because Goa does have this
great heritage of baking, and anything that makes things like pastéis de
nata more available is a good thing. But it’s worth reflecting that the
Portuguese sweets came from a specific context, influenced by the early
development of sugar plantations on the mid-Atlantic island colonies (and
then in Brazil), the tradition of convents running bakeries, the use of egg
whites for clarifying port which lead to the abundance of yolks, and almond
orchards left by the Muslims. Goa has slightly different traditions. I
think it would be good to innovate with what is special to here.”

As it happens, something like that is on the cards in Caranzalem, because
Ralph Prazeres is already building on his raging early success with unique
inventions. For a couple of weeks he was making dangerously good
peanut-butter-and-jelly Berliners (they’re donuts with a filling) and right
now they feature a savoury version that’s bursting with cheese and jalapeno
chilies. “You can expect lots of new things coming down the pipeline,” the
young chef says. “At the moment it’s still a learning curve for a lot of
people as they aren’t familiar with the kinds of products that we’re
making. But everyone who tries us out comes back again, which is such a
great sign. The goal is to bring back the simple joie de vivre, the joy in
food that our parents and grandparents generation used to feel.”

It’s an interesting motivation, which I see bubbling around me quite
profoundly in the millennial generation of Goans and their younger
siblings, who are all decidedly post-colonial in their identity and
outlook, but still hanker for some of the finer things in life that
happened along during the 451-year-old Estado da India. Here, there’s an
especially fascinating parallel with Fado music. The evocative
Islamic-Iberian song tradition was always listened to avidly here, but its
performance in Goa is undergoing an entirely remarkable mass regeneration
under the watchful tutelage of Sonia Shirsat, whose magnificent contralto
singles her out as one of the best and most important practitioners
anywhere in the world.

Right until Covid-19 hampered their progression, there were dozens of
Shirsat’s students scattered all over Goa, and in 2019, the “World’s First
concert house of Fado and Mandó” was opened down the waterfront from my
home in Panjim. My family and I quickly became regulars, and we took all
our guests there too. It was a unique experience: intimate, deeply
emotional with lots of audience participation. In the brief interval, there
were small plates of wonderfully delicious Luso-Indian snacks made by
Marlene de Noronha Meneses, whose husband Carlos plays superb classical
guitar to accompany the singers. Hers were the first truly outstanding
pastéis de nata that I ever ate in Goa.

“My first taste of pastéis de nata was back in 2006, when I visited
Portugal,” says Meneses. “The memory lingered on and drove me to look for
it again, when I visited Macau. What I found there was a close replica but
not quite the same thing. I was craving the taste of the original
Portuguese delicacy and was eager to recreate it somehow. Once I had
succeeded, I started baking it at family gatherings, and was encouraged by
the positive reviews I received.”

In 2019, Meneses set up Marlene’s Tasty Treats in her gorgeous heritage
home in Fontainhas, the Latinate neighborhood of Panjim. Besides the
pastéis, she makes outstanding empadinhas, and the gloriously rich and
sinful Toucinho Do Céu cake (the name means, believe it or not, “bacon from
heaven”.

Until very recently, these kinds of Portuguese treats used to be shared
only behind closed doors, and it took an entire generation of healing, and
renewed self-confidence for them to come out into the open. When I asked
her what she thought about this, the genius baker Vandana Naique – her
shockingly good Bodega is one of the best bakery/cafés anywhere – told me
she endorsed the development enthusiastically. “Younger generations are
thankfully much adventurous in trying out something different,” she said,
“The political and historical baggage is created by people with a false
sense of patriotism and nationalism, and really should have no bearing on
the food we make, eat and serve. We can learn from history, and accept it,
but we cannot keep on rehashing it.”

Meneses echoes those sentiments. She told me that making and sharing
pastéis de nata has nothing to do with nostalgia, but is a simple assertion
of who she is: “My kids will echo my sentiments when I say that we are very
proud to be Indians living in a free country. We just believe in embracing
all the different facets of our rich history. That is the magic that makes
Goa special!”

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