Viana Crescent Pastries
Fried crescent-shaped convent pastries filled with almond, eggs and cassava flour.
- Origin
- Viana do Castelo · Minho
- Place
- Viana do Castelo
- Region
- The North
- Category
- Convent Sweets
- Season
- Year-round; historically for festive occasions
- Evidence
- Well documented
Meias-Luas de Viana are fried pastries made from very thin dough of wheat flour, butter, water and salt. Their filling combines ground almonds, eggs, sugar and farinha de pau—cassava flour—cooked into syrup.
Each pastry is folded and cut into a crescent roughly 10 centimetres across. It is fried in a mixture of oil and butter, then finished with a generous layer of icing sugar that nearly hides the golden surface.
- wheat flour
- butter
- water
- salt
- cassava flour
- eggs
- sugar
- almonds
- frying oil
- icing sugar
A thin fried shell with a sweet almond filling thickened by cassava flour.
Size and sugar-coating thickness vary; the crescent form and cassava-flour filling distinguish the recipe.
At traditional confectioners and gourmet-food shops in Viana do Castelo; the municipality expressly lists Meias-luas among its local sweets and publishes their recipe.
Espresso, black tea or a sweet fortified Vinho Verde.
They are a convent sweet from the Recolhimento de Santiago in Viana. Tradition says the young women sheltered there made them and sold them through the convent turntable: the buyer placed money in the wooden mechanism and received paper-wrapped crescents from the other side.
Well documented
Identity supported by institutional, specialist or corroborating sources.
- tradicional.dgadr.gov.pt/pt/cat/doces-e-produtos-de-pastelaria/188-meias-luas-de-viana (opens in a new tab)
- cm-viana-castelo.pt/visite-viana/descobrir-viana/gastronomia-e-vinhos/curiosidades-gastronomicas (opens in a new tab)
- cm-viana-castelo.pt/visite-viana/descobrir-viana/gastronomia-e-vinhos/tradicoes-culinarias-locais (opens in a new tab)
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