Cascais Pratas
Also known as: Cascais Pratas · Cascais Wafer-thin Biscuits
An almost translucent biscuit, lacy and crisp.
- Origin
- Cascais · recipe recorded in 20th-century cookbooks
- Place
- Cascais
- Region
- Lisbon
- Category
- Cakes & Sweet Breads
- Season
- Year-round
- Evidence
- Well documented
Pratas de Cascais are very thin biscuits made with sugar, flour, butter and egg whites. In the oven, small portions spread into low delicate discs with pale centres and brown, lacy, brittle rims.
Their defining feature is thinness: they should snap easily and feel closer to a fine wafer than a thick butter biscuit. Egg white provides lightness while butter carries a simple toasted flavour.
- Sugar
- Wheat flour
- Butter
- Egg whites
Very crisp and light, with restrained butter, caramelised sugar at the edges and a dry finish.
Diameter and outline may be irregular. What matters is keeping the batter very thin and removing the biscuits as their rims begin to colour.
Look for them at Cascais FoodLab events, fairs and producers involved in recovering the municipality's traditional sweets; they are not a guaranteed everyday bakery item.
Green tea, filter coffee or vanilla ice cream, where they work as a crisp wafer.
Cascais FoodLab traces recipes for Pratas through Cozinha de Lisboa e seu Termo, Tesouros da Cozinha Tradicional Portuguesa and Livro de Pantagruel, first published in the mid-1940s. Their circulation in these cookbooks helped preserve a specialty now less familiar than Areias.
The municipality includes Pratas among the traditional Cascais sweets it has been studying and promoting, alongside Areias, Nozes, Joaninhas and Christmas cakes.
Well documented
Identity supported by institutional, specialist or corroborating sources.
- foodlab.cascais.pt/pt-pt/pratas-de-cascais (opens in a new tab)
- cascais.pt/node/45906 (opens in a new tab)
- foodlab.cascais.pt/pt-pt/docaria-tradicional-de-cascais-em-processo-de-qualificacao (opens in a new tab)
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