Travesseiro de Sintra
Also known as: Travesseiro da Piriquita
A golden, crisp puff-pastry 'pillow' with an egg-and-almond cream filling.
- Origin
- 1940s · Casa Piriquita, Sintra
- Region
- Sintra
- Season
- Year-round
The travesseiro is an elongated rectangle of puff pastry — golden and dusted with sugar — rolled around a silky cream of egg yolks, almond and cinnamon. Its name comes from its shape: a little crisp pillow that shatters into flakes with every bite.
Alongside the queijada, it is the emblematic sweet of Sintra, inseparable from Casa Piriquita in the old town. It is eaten still warm, at the counter or at a cramped café table, with a cup of coffee in front of you.
- puff pastry
- egg yolks
- almonds
- sugar
- cinnamon
- icing sugar
Outside, light, crisp pastry, faintly caramelised; inside, a warm cream scented with almond and cinnamon. Sweet and rich, yet balanced by the freshness of the egg yolks.
The classic recipe, with its secret filling, is kept by Casa Piriquita. Other bakeries in Sintra make their own versions — some heavier on almond, others sweeter.
At Casa Piriquita, in Sintra's historic centre (Rua das Padarias) — the house that made it famous, now with an online shop and addresses in Lisbon. The real one is eaten fresh from the oven.
A short coffee, or tea on a cool afternoon up in the hills.
The travesseiro rose to fame at Casa Piriquita, a bakery founded in 1862 by Amaro dos Santos and Constância Gomes — she nicknamed 'Piriquita', tradition says, by King Carlos I, for her small stature. It was in the 1940s that Constância Luísa Cunha, a family descendant, found the recipe in an old cookbook and revived it. Its roots are sometimes tied to the convent confectionery of the Sintra hills and the Convento dos Capuchos, though that origin is largely the stuff of legend.
The exact recipe for the filling remains a family secret, handed down through the generations — the house is now run by its sixth.
Sources: piriquita.pt · publico.pt · comerciocomhistoria.gov.pt · pt.wikipedia.org · visitsintra.travel