Sugar, fat, nuns and DaGama.

These are the four things that finally draw me outside of Lisbon for the first

time. This morning, I grab my bag and a fistful of Euros and ride the creaky

elevator down to the lobby, excited as I’ve been in days. “I’ve seen Lisbon,” I

think, “and now I get to see Portugal!”

That’s a stretch. My destination is Belem, a pretty little town lying

leafy and green, just to the west. Belem is not much more than a suburb of

Lisbon, so close that I travel there on Lisbon public transit. I take the blue line

to Figueira square, make a transfer just past the hulking statue of King John,

and fifteen minutes later I’m gliding into Belem on an electric yellow tram.

The trip is a cinch, but this wasn’t always the case.

Once, Belem was so separate from Lisbon that the journey could only be

made by boat. Like Lisbon, Belem sits on the shores of the Rio Tejo Estuary,

where the river swells and grows salty on its way to the sea. But at Belem,

the river narrows just a bit, one last moment of quiet before the Tejo throws

itself into the sprawling Atlantic Ocean. This little geographic pause is what

made Belem so important during the Age of Discovery. Explorers turned the

town into a pit stop of sorts, a little cradle of calm where they could rest and

pray before heading out onto the open waters.

In 1497, Vasco da Gama and his crew stopped in Belem on their way to India,

pausing for the night at a little hermitage that was nearly crumbling down.

When the men returned safely home—“safely” being a stretch, since only

half of them survived—King Henry the Navigator commissioned a sprawling

monastery on the site. He called it Sao Jeronimo’s in honor of St. Jerome, and

today, it’s one of the two main reasons that people come to visit Belem. The

other is the tarts, a little pastry called “Pasteis de Belem.”

I’m not going to lie, I’m here in Belem for dessert.

The tarts are a kind of confection called “convent sweets,” and they have

their own story and place in Portugal’s history, though to understand it we

first need to know a little more about the Age of Discovery and the Church

both.

By the time the tarts were invented, colonialism was already in full force, and

Portugal had claimed land for itself in Asia, India, South America and Africa.

In the latter two places, Portugal established vast sugar plantations, clearing

the land and forcing thousands of natives into slavery to farm it. For the first

time in Portugal’s history, sugar was abundant. At the time, though, it was

just for the elites—the clergy and the aristocracy—and inside Portugal’s

convents, where the sugar often fell, those categories were often one and

the same.

During this time, the daughters of the Portuguese aristocracy faced a

dilemma. Eligible bachelors were in short supply. Lots of aristocratic young

men had died fighting in the new colonies, and some families only allowed

the oldest son to marry to keep their fortunes intact. For a woman of the

aristocracy, marrying outside of her class wasn’t an option, and when an

eligible bachelor was found, the price of a dowry was often enough for a

greedy father to snap his wallet shut. Excess daughters, these women were

called, too expensive to keep and stamped with expiration dates. All across

Portugal—and in Spain and Italy, too—single ladies piled up in drifts that

grew as quickly as the sugar stores.

So what were these young women to do? Unwanted at home, not allowed to

live on their own, they had one socially acceptable option. Convents. By the

1600s, more than a third of aristocratic women in Portugal were channeled

into convents. The women had no say in the matter. They packed a bag or

two, left everyone they knew and loved, and prepared to meet the “heavenly

groom,” Jesus Christ himself, standing at the altar in a rented tux with a

bored look on his face.

This would be heartbreaking even today, when nuns are allowed to have jobs

and cars and roles in their communities. But the excess daughters landed at

the convents during a time known as “enclosure,” a complete and total

lockdown declared by the Vatican. Nuns were to be kept behind locked gates,

never allowed out, and were punished severely for any infractions. A nun

named Sister Antonia broke the laws of enclosure by entertaining a monk in

her cell and was walled in alive, allowed only a bit of bread and water each

day through a hole in the bricks. (No word on what happened to the monk,

but I’ll bet he got at least some jelly with his bread.) Several young women

who managed to escape the convent walls were chased down by

townspeople and made to stand trial. These girls—forced to leave everyone

they loved and already marked as unwanted social rejects—were now

essentially prisoners.

I’ve been researching the girls for a few days now, and late last night, reading

by the windows in Lisbon while the rest of the neighborhood slept, I came

across my favorite excess daughter. (And then, of course I paused to consider

how strange this writing adventure has already gotten, because who knew I

would ever come to have such a thing?) 

My girl was not just a nun, but a writer, and her name was Archangela Tarabotti.

 You might guess from that name that she's not Portuguese, and you’d be right. 

She was an Italiannwoman, from across the water in Venice, and there’s so much

to love about her.

For starters, there’s that name. Archangela. She wasn’t just any old Angela,

but the highest of all the Angelas, a fact I easily concede when I read her

gutsy, angry writings. Even from behind the convent walls, Tarabotti sharply

criticized the Church. She railed against Venetian society for giving women no

place in it. And hoo boy, she held particular ire for the fathers of excess

daughters like herself.

“We’re only offering up our daughters to God,” the fathers said, smiling

piously as they counted their gold coins.

To which Archangela replied, nice try. “They don’t give to God the most

beautiful,” she wrote, “but the ugly and deformed. Lame, hunchbacked,

crippled, condemned to spend the rest of their lives in prison.”

Archangela herself was disabled, and her lack of formal education

embarrassed her, but she taught herself what she could. She wrote page

after page of social critique, then risked her life to smuggle her work out to

the world via sympathetic visitors. She’d produced four published books by

the time she died at the age of forty-eight, and their titles say it all: Paternal

Tyranny, The Monastic Hell, and The Purgatory of Unhappily Married Women,

which, let’s be honest, could probably sell today. I pumped my fist in the air

for those first three, but this last one had me holding my chest: Che le Donne

Siano Della Specie Degli Womani. In English, That Women Are of the Human

Species. Such a sad and simple demand, isn’t it? Just to be seen as people, separate

from the animals.

Archangela and Sister Antonia and all of the excess daughters served life

sentences. The Vatican rarely granted annulment of vows. There was little

chance of escape, and anyway, where would a woman of that time go? It was

the Age of Exploration for exactly one type of person. While Vasco’s men

were out on open waters, taking in facefuls of salty sunlight, the excess girls

lived in tiny cells and met with visitors through barred windows.

And here’s where we finally come back to the tarts, because when all of that

African and South American sugar began piling up at the convent gates, these

were the women who greeted it. Girls whose privilege had thus far done little

for them were finally thrown the tiniest of indulgences. Marriage? Nope.

Career? Not a chance. Sex? Keep dreaming, sister. But by God, those ladies

might manage to get themselves a little dessert.

It wasn’t just sugar that the sisters had in spades. They also had egg yolks,

dozens and dozens of fat yellow bellies trembling together in buckets on the

counter. The yolks themselves were excess, cast aside after the nuns used

the whites to starch their habits and filter wine. One day, some brilliant sister

in some dark convent must have decided to fold the yolks together with the

newly arrived sugar. She whipped and whisked until the yolks grew glossy

and pale, then set the mixture over a flame until fat bubbles burst at the

surface. The resulting pudding would become the base for nearly every

convent sweet to follow.

Before long, a hot river of custard flowed across the convents of Portugal, up

toward Porto and Chaves, snaking down over Lisbon and into the rocky

Algarve. Each convent put their own twist on the custard, and a whole class

of desserts was born. To the east, in Evora, the nuns laced the custard with

lemon and almonds and slipped it between thin layers of dough. In the green

valleys of Tomar, they baked the pudding into quivering loaves that could be

sliced like bread. In Alentejo, they added flour and cinnamon to make cakes

that poofed up in the oven like little clouds. In Aveiro, the legend goes, a nun

was ordered by her Mother Superior to fast, as a punishment for gluttony.

But in a bold act of rebellion, she hid dollops of custard inside the papery

dough used for Holy Communion, her indulgence safely hidden.

The names of each convent sweet whispers a clue of what life behind the

walls might have been like. There’s the mildly depressing Wipe the Convent

and the matter-of-fact Yarn Eggs and Thin Breads. There’s the borderline

whimsical, Bacon of Heaven and Monk’s Torches. And then there are the

names that hint of something sweeter, little slivers of happiness in an

otherwise impossible life: “Angel’s Double Chin”, “Gossip of Nuns”, and

“Dreams of Hope.”

In the Lisbon area, the signature convent sweet has a less creative name.

They’re simply called pasteis de nata, meaning “cream tarts,” and I find them

lining the windows of nearly every bakery that I pass on my trips around the

city. Here in Belem, pasteis de nata are called pasteis de Belem, and are said

to be the best in the area. I make a quick trip through Jeronimos

Monastery—cold, imposing, gorgeous—and head up the street to try a few

tarts at a little bakery called Antiga Confeteria de Belem. The Old

Confectionery of Belem.

The café is just a few blocks walk from the monastery, wedged in next to a

Starbucks, with bright blue awnings out front and a façade of green and blue

azulejo tiles. There’s a crowd out front, and inside, waiters in white

shirtsleeves and blue ties are rushing from the kitchen with tray after tray of

tarts. As you might guess, these workers are neither monks nor nuns.

Once, convent sweets were made for the nuns—or monks, as the case

sometimes was—to eat themselves, or to serve at lavish banquets to visiting

clergy. As the years went on, the treats were sometimes sold to

townspeople, often to raise funds for the convents and monasteries. But in

the 1800s, the Liberal Revolution swept across Portugal and the religious

orders were disbanded. Production of the convent sweets fell to local

bakeries, like the one I find myself in now.

I buy half a dozen tarts. They’re not much bigger than a silver dollar and

stacked end to end in a blue paper sleeve spotted with hot fat. The café is

thick with tourists, so I take my purchase and walk a few blocks, to a little

patch of green across the street from Jeronimos. I sit on a park bench, the

great stony monastery before me, DaGama’s wide river at my back. I stretch

out my bare legs in the sunshine, never so grateful for the freedom to do so,

and open my little package.

A pasteis de nata is pretty much what you might guess it to be. The bakers

boil the customary yolks and sugar into a thick custard, then puddle the

mixture into a little puff pastry nest. They bake the tarts until the tops blister,

then dust them with powdered sugar that gradually slumps and melts from

the heat. It’s a homely little treat, nothing fancy or worthy of a magazine

cover, but as I pull a tart from the package, I figure, “There’s got to be

something to a dessert that’s lasted for hundreds of years.”

Quickly enough, I find that a pasteis de nata isn’t something that a girl eats

delicately. I try to be dainty, sitting as I am in the wide open sunshine of a

busy city park. But one bite in and the crackly pastry refuses to tear beneath

my teeth, so I tug at it a bit with a mouth already full of hot yellow custard.

Finally, I concede defeat and shove the whole thing in, a little shake of

powdered sugar tumbling down my chin as I do. I close my eyes for a second

and take it all in: the rich custard and buttery pastry and the sugar that melts

on my tongue like cotton candy. It is my own kind of holy moment.

I have a second tart, and then a third, and before long I’m thinking of the

excess daughters, wondering what moments of happiness they might have

gotten. I think of Archangela Tarabotti, bravely scribbling away at a system

she knew to be wrong. Of Sister Antonia, nibbling her daily bread and

dreaming of the sunshine she knew as a girl. I think of all the Marys and

Marias and Theresas, from Belem to Lisbon to Madrid and Rome, forced into

arranged marriages with a God that was distant and cold. I sit in the sun and

work my way through my little package of convent sweets, and I hope that

those girls found some little bits of sweetness in the lives that were forced

upon them.

On the yellow tram back to Lisbon, I watch the green trees blur by and dream

up a little scene. I imagine the excess daughters, gathered in stone kitchens

late at night, shoulder to shoulder around baking sheets and copper pots. A

pile of starched habits lies dumped at the door, and a black dress or two falls

to the floor, too heavy in the heat. I see the sisters shaping pyramids of

custard under their warm hands, giggling as they rap cake pans hard against

the counter, sending up dust clouds of powdered sugar into the warm air.

Their fingers dip again and again into marble bowls, and their chins grow slick

and sweet from all the gluttony.

I hope against hope that those excess daughters stuffed themselves silly, got

to the bottom of the copper pot and found a warm little God made of sugar

and fat, a sweet God that dripped on their forearms and could be licked up

and swallowed whole. I hope they feasted until they were stuffed,

completely satisfied, and until there were only a handful of leftovers for the

visiting clergy. I hope that in the small ways they could, they fed themselves

the things the world would not.