The regions of sweetmaking

From the granite of the Minho to the terraced slopes of the Douro, the North keeps a hearty, generous tradition deeply tied to its pilgrimage festivals. In Porto, the city of historic cafés, reign tortas, little cakes and above all egg-yolk sweets served with port wine — for here the fortified wine joins the table from start to finish.

The Minho is a land of feasting: the rebuçados sweets of Régua, the cavacas of Caldas de Vizela, and in Guimarães the tortas de Guimarães — flaky, filled with a cream of egg, almond and pumpkin, scented with the cinnamon that is the cradle-city's signature. In Amarante, the baking takes curious shapes for the festival of São Gonçalo, the frankly phallic dough-and-sugar tokens that descend from ancient fertility rites.

Up the Douro, the vine dictates the calendar, but chestnut, honey and almond fill the winter kitchens. This is a tradition born of Benedictine convents and saints' feasts, made to feed those who work hard land — abundant, perfumed and unashamed sweets, in the image of the people of the North.

Beyond the mountains, in the cold highland country of Trás-os-Montes, the sweets are wintry and bound to the calendar. The biting cold, the chestnut groves and the beehives shaped a tradition of dense, warming sweets: chestnut, honey, almond and walnut are the base of everything, from chestnut cake to stuffed walnuts, from economias to the sweets of the pig-killing season.

Every feast has its sweet. Christmas brings filhós and rabanadas; Carnival, the fried orelhas and sonhos; the summer saints' days, the folares. In Bragança and Chaves, cavacas and almond cakes accompany homemade liqueurs, and across the region the smoked sausages share the table with sweets that make use of autumn's abundance — for here nothing is wasted.

It is an austere, honest tradition, without the gloss of the capital's pastries, but with a depth of flavour that comes from the land and the fire. In the granite villages, where winter is long, the sweet is also comfort and communion — made at home, shared by the hearth, tied to the cycle of seasons and feasts.

The Centre is the convent heartland of Portugal, and its sweet king is the ovos moles of Aveiro — a cream of yolks and sugar wrapped in a thin wafer shaped like a whelk, a fish or a barrel, echoing the lagoon and the salt. Created in Aveiro's convents and sold by their former pupils, in 2008 they earned the EU's Protected Geographical Indication, the first granted to a Portuguese sweet.

In Coimbra, home of the country's oldest university, the baking has the air of academic festivity: the arrufadas buns, the pastéis de Tentúgal — pastry so thin you can see light through it, filled with egg cream — and the pastéis de Santa Clara, an inheritance of the Poor Clares. Climbing into the Beiras, the landscape changes: borrachões, tigeladas, Serra da Estrela curd cheese with pumpkin jam, and the chestnut that perfumes everything in winter.

It is a region of contrasts — the Aveiro lagoon and the Estrela mountains, the delicate wafer and the buttery cheese — bound by a single devotion to eggs and sugar. To taste the Centre is to travel through centuries of nuns' handiwork, from the Convent of Jesus in Aveiro to the kitchens of Tentúgal.

Between the Atlantic and the Serra dos Candeeiros, the Oeste — the West — is perhaps the most convent-shaped region of all, and everything turns around the Monastery of Alcobaça. The Cistercian monks, who farmed orchards and vineyards there from the twelfth century, left a legacy of egg-and-fruit sweets — pão de ló sponge, trouxas-de-ovos rolled in threads of sugar, and the legendary abundance of confections that so astonished travellers.

Caldas da Rainha gave the country its cavacas — dry, crisp and cloaked in a glossy white glaze — and the trouxa-de-ovos das Caldas, egg yolk poached in syrup. Óbidos, a walled medieval town, is today synonymous with ginjinha cherry liqueur served in little chocolate cups, but its almond-and-egg sweets are just as old. And from Alcobaça come pão de ló and stuffed walnuts that celebrate the bounty of its orchards.

This is the baking of fertile, generous land, where the Alcobaça apple, the rocha pear and pumpkin enter the trays as readily as eggs. Among pilgrimages, medieval fairs and chocolate festivals, the Oeste keeps one of the richest and least-known traditions in the country — monastery sweetness served by the sea.

In the romantic hills of Sintra, among palaces and drifting mist, the local sweets have two inseparable stars. The queijada de Sintra — small, with thin pastry and a filling of fresh curd cheese, sugar, eggs and cinnamon — is so old that it was once used to pay feudal dues in the Middle Ages. The Piriquita and the historic Fábrica das Verdadeiras Queijadas da Sapa, founded in 1756, keep alive a recipe that has crossed the centuries almost unchanged.

The second emblem is more recent but no less of the hills: the travesseiro, created at Piriquita in 1862. It is a long, sugar-dusted puff pastry filled with an egg-and-almond cream that melts on the tongue — the sweet that nearly every visitor carries away, wrapped, from the old town. Together, queijada and travesseiro define the taste of Sintra: milk and almond, pastry and cinnamon.

This is the baking of a cool, damp mountain, heir to the farms and convents scattered across the range. To eat it in Sintra's narrow streets, beside a cup of tea, is part of the romantic ritual that Byron and the nineteenth-century travellers so loved to celebrate — the enchanted hills can be tasted, too.

Lisbon is, above all, the city of a single pastry. In Belém, in the shadow of the Jerónimos Monastery, the pastel de nata was born — crisp laminated pastry filled with an egg-yolk custard that caramelises in the oven until it is freckled dark. When the religious orders were dissolved in 1834, the monks sold the recipe to the neighbouring sugar refinery, and in 1837 the Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opened its doors, still guarding the secret of the dough and the protected name «Pastel de Belém».

Yet the capital's sweets are not exhausted by one recipe. Lisbon was always the port where the sugar of the islands and Brazil arrived, and from its pastelarias came rice cakes, flaky jesuítas, palmiers and the cream-filled bolas de Berlim that crowd the terraces from Estoril to Cais do Sodré. This is an urban tradition — marble counters and an espresso alongside — built to be eaten standing up, in the morning.

Across the city, century-old houses survive: the Confeitaria Nacional on the Rossio, open since 1829, or the Pastelaria Versailles on the Avenida, where the Christmas bolo-rei, ovos moles and convent sweets sit beside freshly roasted coffee. To eat something sweet in Lisbon is, in truth, to taste the meeting point of the whole country: whatever came from the countryside, the convents and the sea always ended up passing through here.

On the golden plain of the Alentejo, the convent tradition perhaps reaches its peak. Évora, a museum-city ringed by convents, gave the country the sericaia — a cream of eggs, milk, sugar and cinnamon cooked slowly until its surface cracks, served with the sweet, amber Elvas plums, which carry their own protected designation. It is a sweet of intense aroma and velvet texture, an absolute icon of the Alentejo table.

From Elvas come the candied plums themselves, a Moorish inheritance turned into convent art; from Évora, the pão de rala — an almond-and-gila-squash paste with a thread of egg sweet at its core — and the curd-cheese queijadas. Across the plain, the encharcada (yolk and sugar baked until golden), the toucinhos-rançosos, the tibornas and the honey-and-olive-oil cakes tell the story of the nuns of Beja, Évora and Vila Viçosa.

This is the baking of patient abundance, born where wheat, olive oil and honey are plentiful and time moves slowly. Dense, sweet, perfumed with cinnamon and almond, the sweets of the Alentejo are the purest testament to the Portuguese convent genius — made to last and to celebrate.

In the south, under the sun and eight centuries of Moorish heritage, the Algarve's sweets rest on three pillars: almond, fig and carob. It was the Moors who planted the almond groves and taught the working of almond paste, and from that tradition come the Dom Rodrigos — threads of egg and almond wrapped in coloured silver foil — and the morgados, dense almond cakes that crown any celebration.

The fig, sun-dried, becomes stars, little cakes and the famous «fig cheeses» — a paste of dried fig, almond, chocolate and spice pressed into a cheese shape and cut into slices. Carob, the fruit of the tree that dots the whole Algarve hill country, enters dark cakes and flours that once replaced chocolate in times of scarcity — a deep, earthy flavour, wholly of the south.

This is a Mediterranean tradition, Moorish in soul, of modelled figures and vivid colour, made to keep in the heat and to shine at festivals. In Loulé, Tavira, Silves and across the barrocal, the almond blossoms in January and the orchards perfume the whole year — and in the sweets lives the memory of Al-Gharb, the Arab west of the Peninsula.

Madeira's sweets were born, quite literally, from sugar. It was the cane planted on the island in the fifteenth century that supplied Europe and financed Portuguese expansion — and it was its cane honey, dark and thick, that gave the island its mother-sweet: the bolo de mel da Madeira. Spiced with cinnamon, clove and fennel, studded with walnut and almond, it is traditionally broken by hand and keeps for months — the Madeiran Christmas cake, made in December to last the year.

Beside the bolo de mel reign the queijadas — small, of milk or curd cheese — along with honey broas, walnut cake and the fennel sweets that perfume the streets of Funchal. The cane also gave homemade liqueurs and keeping-sweets, and the island's tropical fruit — passionfruit, custard apple, banana — now enters desserts that link the Atlantic to the tropics.

It is an island tradition, deeply spiced, heir to the sugar and spice routes that called at the island. Dense, dark and profoundly aromatic, the sweets of Madeira taste of history — of the age when the white gold of cane made this Atlantic island the centre of the world's sweet trade.

Mid-ocean, scattered across nine islands, the sweets of the Azores are as many as their landscapes. Each island keeps its own: the queijadas of Graciosa, small and golden; the queijadas of Vila Franca do Campo, on São Miguel, of puff pastry and yolk; the caçoilas and the fofas — light, airy cream puffs served everywhere. Volcanic soil, abundant milk and isolation created a repertoire all their own, stubbornly local.

São Miguel gave the bolo lêvedo — a sweet, fluffy bread cooked on a griddle, descended from the breads of the Holy Spirit — and the sweets tied to the Festas do Divino that fill the Azorean calendar with bread, sweet dough and offering. Terceira has its Dona Amélia, dark little cakes of honey, cinnamon and raisins made in a queen's honour; Pico and Faial keep liqueurs and fruit sweets; and across every island the malassadas of Carnival fry in abundance.

It is an Atlantic tradition, milky and festive, paced by pilgrimages and the Holy Spirit, where convent sugar meets the plenty of the cattle and the memory of the first settlers. To eat something sweet in the Azores is to taste nine different worlds, linked by the sea, the mist and a single joy of celebration.

Some sweets belong to no single town: they cross the whole country, from Lisbon's neighbourhood pastelarias to the villages of the interior. The pastel de nata is today Portugal's ambassador to the world, but beside it stand the bolas de Berlim of the summer beaches, the rice cakes of the coffee break, the palmiers and the jesuítas that fill the display cases from north to south.

There are also the sweets of the calendar, shared by all: the filhós, rabanadas and the bolo-rei of Christmas; the orelhas and sonhos of Carnival; the folar and sugared almonds of Easter; the cinnamon-dusted rice pudding that closes almost every festive meal. These are sweets made at home and in the bakery alike, bound up with family, faith and the seasons.

This nationwide tradition is the common denominator of a country of a thousand traditions. It gathers the legacy of the convents, the sugar of the islands and the eggs of the countryside into a language every Portuguese recognises — proof that, however many secrets each region keeps, a love of the sweet binds the country from North to South.