Accidental tourist: Pastéis will never be the same

A pastél rested in my hand, heavy with promise. Perky pastry covered like lingerie what lay within, waiting.

Sunday Times Lifestyle

TELFORD VICE in Cape Town

The queue to No. 84 Rua de Belém loomed as long as the ooze of a Lisbon summer’s day into evening and was as thick as custard with tourists and locals alike.

All squinted and sweated in the 30-whatever-degree heat. None complained, not with our minds’ eyes on this particular prize.

You could call Fábrica Pastéis de Belém — which is at No. 84 — a bakery. You could call the pastéis de nata they’ve been making, in ever increasing numbers but of utterly consistent quality since 1837, custard tarts.

You could also be stupid. Or, at best, tongue deaf.

Religious orders fell on hard times after the Liberal Revolution of 1820, and to raise funds pastéis de nata were baked by monks in the nearby Mosteiro dos Jerónimos and sold at a handily close sugar refinery. The monks were French, and thus knew only too well the wonder that was the custard tart. The Portuguese version was set apart by the addition of egg yolks that were left over after the whites had been used to starch nuns’ habits and the like.

In 1834 the mosteiro was shuttered and the inmates driven out. Happily, the secret recipe survived because those mercenary monks sold it to the sugar refinery, who established the fábrica, and the fruits of all that history awaited us at the end of this damn queue.

It moved quickly in random squirts, and 12 minutes after we joined the line we had, in our hot little hands, a box in which nestled four of the gooey gorgeousnesses.

Others scoffed theirs in the unspeakable squalor of a neighbouring Starbucks. We, of course, did not. Instead, we walked purposefully to the Jardim Vasco da Gama and settled under an olive tree.

With a sprinkling of cinnamon and a dusting of icing sugar, we were good to go. Which was when a blasphemous blip hit at least one of us: would they live up to the hype?

A pastél rested in my hand, heavy with promise. Perky pastry covered like lingerie what lay within, waiting. Partly covered, that is. From the centre peeped a circle, concave like a sacral dimple, of yellow freckled with black.

The whole quivered in anticipation. Or was that my hand? Either way, there was no slip twixt pastél and lip. And teeth … And tongue … And mouth …

And?

Comes a point in these things when you want to leave the rest of the thinking to Lester Bangs or Hunter S. Thompson or Rian Malan and soak up, wordlessly, the bliss of it all. But Bangs and Thompson are dead, and if Malan is alive he has far more existentially important stuff to agonise over than the quality of a pastél de nata. Even if the pastél de nata concerned is the original and the finest yet baked on God’s earth. Sorry, Mr Malan — the finest yet baked on this cursed, crisis-crippled excuse for a planet that doesn’t deserve the benevolent attentions of any self-respecting god. My traitor’s tart, indeed.

Yes, it was that good. Good enough to make you want to sue other bakeries on Fábrica Pastéis de Belém’s behalf for passing their stodgy, sickly sweet offerings off as something that deserve to be called pastéis de nata.

A cloud perfectly balanced between sweetness, richness and molten irresistibility filled my mouth. It was like eating satisfaction itself.

Thing is, there are at best two decent bites to be had from a pastél. Too soon, it was over.

Thoughts of re-joining the queue were quelled by the fact that we had to get the metro back to Alfama in the city centre for an already booked and paid for fado show.

We walked to the station with the angelic alchemy of egg yolks, sugar and milk still aswirl in our senses. Nothing could ever be the same.