Pastel de nata: what is in it and where it comes from

Three things, and not one more: puff pastry pushed into a shell, an egg-yolk custard poured into it, an oven. The catalogue of traditional products of the Portuguese agriculture administration, which keeps a file on it, measures the Belém tart at about seven centimetres across and describes crisp leaves of pastry around a mild-tasting custard. It is eaten at any hour of the day, and may be dusted with icing sugar, cinnamon, or both, as it goes to the mouth.

The file also gives the recipe, warning that it is approximate. For the custard: yolks, flour, whole milk, sugar, water, cinnamon, lemon zest, cooked first in a bain-marie. For the pastry: flour, margarine, water, plus, it writes, a few ingredients that are the secret of this pastry. The rounds are spread by hand, then pushed with the thumbs into small moulds. And the baking is brutal: an oven at 400 °C, a quarter of an hour, until they colour. That is where the brown-spotted top comes from.

One detail in the name does not fit. Nata, in Portuguese, is the cream of the milk, the fatty skin that rises to the surface. The recipe the state publishes contains no cream: whole milk. The Priberam dictionary, for its part, defines the pastel de nata by a filling based on natas e ovos, cream and eggs. The two definitions do not say the same thing, and that is a good reason not to look for the nata on the plate.

The difference is legal, not culinary. Pastel de nata is the common name, the one the tart carries across the country and in the dictionary. Pastéis de Belém is the name of a single house, the Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, at rua de Belém 84-92 in Lisbon. Nobody else has the right to write it on a box.

This is not a custom, it is a register. Two Portuguese trade marks filed on the same day, 27 April 1918, registered on 19 July 1919 and still in force: PASTEIS DE BELEM and, more surprising, PASTEIS SYSTEMA DE BELEM, the Belém system. Both are in the name of Antiga Confeitaria de Belém, Lda., in class 30, that of pastries. They can be found in the TMview database, which aggregates the national registers and shows here the Portuguese office’s.

The state’s file puts pastéis de nata among the variants of pastéis de Belém, and adds a sentence worth reading twice: nothing is proved of their origins, except that every pastel de nata in the country came here for its recipe. In other words: the same object, two names, only one of which is a property.

Nobody knows, and Portugal’s most official source says so itself. The agriculture administration’s file tells the legend: the house was born in 1837 beside the monastery of the Hieronymite friars, who, the legend says, were already making these cakes. Then it corrects itself at once: a more recent version of the same legend credits the pastéis to the nuns of the convent of Odivelas, and nothing is proved.

The house has its own version, and publishes it. At the start of the nineteenth century a cane sugar refinery with a small shop was working at Belém. In 1834 a decree closed every convent and monastery in the country and expelled the clergy; someone from the monastery then put pastries on sale in the shop, which were soon called pastéis de Belém. Making began in 1837, in buildings next to the refinery, with the secret recipe from the monastery. The Lisbon city council’s file adds that this someone had been expelled from the monastery of the Hieronymites. Neither page cites a contemporary document.

And a researcher says the opposite. João Pedro Gomes, of the university of Coimbra, defended in December 2022 a thesis of some seven hundred pages on the origins of Portuguese confectionery. Asked by the Lusa agency, he runs through the counter-examples to popular knowledge, among them this: the pastel de nata is not from Belém, it comes from France and, in Portugal, originally had pine nuts in it. He does not give his demonstration in the dispatch, and that is all that is publicly known of it.

Because that is said of almost every Portuguese sweet, and because the idea itself was manufactured. That is Gomes’s conclusion, which he sums up to Lusa in one line: it is a created myth; the convents made sweets too, as everyone did. Recipes did circulate outside the walls, with a certain prestige from having been made there. But different from what was made outside? No. Secret? No: secrecy around a recipe book is, he says, a much more recent practice.

The myth hardens in the nineteenth century, and for very concrete reasons. With the religious orders suppressed, nuns lived on alms and used sweets for an income; some monasteries began teaching the girls of the neighbourhood, who learned there to read, to keep a house and to make cakes. Pastry shops then seized on the idea to sell, attaching to each sweet a story that often no document supports.

The commonest story goes the same way: the nuns who starched their habits with egg white, hence a surplus of yolks, hence the egg sweets. It is a little tale, Gomes answers: there is no written proof that linen was starched with egg white, and the only known proof of how starching was done comes from an Arabic manuscript from the Iberian peninsula, which speaks of wheat starch.

To measure the difference, compare a sweet whose conventual origin the state does write down. The file on the ovos moles of Aveiro, protected by a geographical indication, dates the matter to 1502: Manuel I then granted ten arrobas of sugar from the island of Madeira a year to the convent of Jesus at Aveiro, for sweets given to convalescents, and the tradition later passed through the convents’ former pupils. Nothing of the kind exists for the pastel de nata: the gap between the two files is the gap between a document and a story.

Pastel, plural pastéis, is not a pastry cook’s word: it is a dough word. The Priberam dictionary defines it as a dish of flour dough with a filling, sweet or savoury, and derives it from the Old French pastel, cake, piece of dough, which became pâte in modern French. The same entry takes in the expression pastel de nata, defined as a small round cake of puff pastry with a filling of cream and eggs.

Nata is cream, and the word comes from far: from late Latin natta, itself from matta, a rush mat. The image is of the skin that forms on the surface of milk, like a mat. Priberam finally notes a regional usage a visitor soon hears at the till: nata on its own can mean the tart itself. Ordering uma nata is enough.