Sunday, 12 June
Our second day in Coimbra was a designated pastry day. Portugal is famous for pastries, not just the pastel de nata but an incredible diversity of baked sweet things. I say incredible diversity, but what I am referring to is hundreds of very slightly different iterations of essentially the same thing. The general idea revolves around the creative de- and re-construction of egg yolks. For example, the ‘croissant’ in this country is not the familiar French item at all but a briochy Trojan horse full of egg.
Supposedly, there was a surplus of yolks in Portugal of old due to the use of egg whites in monastery laundries. I’m not sure if this is true. If it is true, it begs the question of why more European countries don’t have sweet egg yolk pastry traditions on the same scale. Perhaps the nuns and monks of other European counties just had dirty clothes!
Anyway, one of the pastries we started with was, appropriately enough, called a ‘Santa Clara’. This is a kind of mini-empanada hemicircle filled with a paste of ground and sliced almonds and egg yolk (surprise!). The pastry had a very unusual texture, soft but not flaky, dense but not tough.
We ate this pastry, all the more appropriately, in front of the recently excavated ruins of the monastery of Santa Clara. This early 14th-century building had been flooded for many years but was recently drained and uncovered in an impressive project. The ruins were walled off and one enters the grounds through a raised concrete museum, an expensive structure redolent of generous EU grants. Unfortunately, the museum ticket officer was extremely patronising. É a vida.
Anyway, after a brief pause we ate our second pastry. This is called tetúgal, and consists of a long sausage shape of filo pastry, filled with… egg yolk. It tasted basically how you would imagine such a thing to taste, not unpleasant. The sad reality is that, despite the many different stories and ideas behind these lesser-known pastries, they mostly feel like wonky prototypes for the masterpiece, the pastel de nata. Sometimes popular things deserve their fame.
We decided to head out of the old Santa Clara monastery and up a typically steep hill to the monastery’s ‘new’ replacement, a 17th-century complex. Eventually we reached it, and saw that it was acting as a parish church. There was an impressive number of cars parked outside the building, and we arrived just as mass had finished. Dozens of Coimbrans walked out of the church and right into their air-conditioned cars to go home for lunch.
Once the cars thinned out, we walked onto the terrace in front of the church in the blazing sunshine to look out towards the hill which old Coimbra sits on. It was a good view, punctuated by echoes from an excited tannoy-amplified voice. This was because of a major cycle race going on, an amazing undertaking given the mid-thirties Celsius heat. We carefully made our way downhill and past the cyclists (and sprinters!) who were dowsing themselves with bottles of water.
Up the next set of hills we went, and we were back in the centre of the old university town. Hungry, we decided to have half a bifana sandwich, a popular snack based on a pork steak cooked in garlic and reduced wine sauce. Bea’s half had a whole bay leaf in it. She tells me that this was a reasonable version of the genre but that it is supposed to have far more of the garlic sauce – I imagine this would be an improvement.
Another item on our menu was a second round of ice cream from the amazing place in the square. This time the flavours were, for Bea, sumac & bergamot and pistachio; for me, it was salted caramel and hazelnut. Bea’s choice was more imaginative and it was clear why pistachio is such a classic ice cream flavour, able to withstand being frozen and losing none of its intensity. We also ate the remainder of our jamon and olives in the same square later in the day. This was good, although the ham had sweated rather in its packet!
The heat was becoming unreasonable. This kind of heat has one seeking out shade in the way one might seek cover from pyroclastic flows. Our cover in this case was the university’s huge botanical gardens, recommended to us by Erik and Shelley. This was a great recommendation. The gardens have formal sections with box hedges and flower beds, and also ‘landscape gardens’ with bamboo woods. The whole thing is planned around the steep topography with different levels, and baroque follies punctuate the threshold between spaces. In addition to this, there were extremely tall palm trees and a giant wrinkly mangrove tree which seems to lay its roots by reaching down from its branches. The sum total made for a simultaneously exotic and jungle-y but Europeanised vision, which was intriguing.
Eventually, we mustered the will to get up and walk back to the centre. We were searching for fado, the traditional Portuguese music which in Coimbra originates with medieval ‘troubadour’ culture and involves students singing songs about places and, of course, love. The performance took place in a cafe converted from an old Renaissance church, with a marvellous vaulted ceiling. The fado singer was dressed in a huge black wool cape, a piece of Coimbra’s academic dress which seemed brutal considering the climatic conditions here in summer. Appropriately enough, the serenade-like music had a soporific, heat-induced stupor about it. The chord progressions sagged down chromatically and then lazily picked themselves up again. Bea made the excellent observation that the music replicated the feeling of slowly trekking up and down Coimbra’s hills.
While we sat listening, we ordered a pair of Super Bocks, but our waiter helpfully enquired if we would prefer to try a local (and of course more expensive) beer. We decided to go for it. What came was two bottles of ‘Praxis’. Amusingly, this mean’s ‘doctor’s office’ in German but in Coimbra refers to traditional academic initiation ceremonies. The beer was a light Weissbier, emblematic of the style in most ways but with the citric sharpness had been turbocharged. This made it refreshing and moreish.
Beer in Portugal is a strange proposition. People drink it in great quantities, and we saw it being consumed by young and old alike from about 9am onwards. However, the choice is often limited. There are two huge breweries which dominate the Portuguese market: ‘Super Bock’ and ‘Sagres’. One is a pilsner, the other is a lager. Both are okay, but their bland flavour speaks to a vacuum of innovation. This has been the case for decades. Bizarrely, Salazar’s 20th-century dictatorship only allowed these two (then state-owned) breweries to operate, eliminating everyone else. The effects of the ‘duopoly’ lives on in the unavailability of other beers today. However, things may be slowly changing, and the Praxis might be an example of this – it rather vaguely terms itself the ‘first microbrewery’.
After the fado, we made our way back via a supermarket and the waterfront. We picked up a bottle of vinho verde, a wine from a region of northern Portugal associated with a ‘green’ or young flavour. It’s slightly fizzy from the fermentation of residual sugars in the bottle. This example had a slightly disconcerting blue-glass bottle, but the liquid was the right colour!
We brought the bottle back to the odd little courtyard in the back of our hostel-like hotel. After a few moments of awkwardness, we started talking to some fellow travellers, two Manchester natives, with whom we shared our wine. These young women, about our age, were touring Portugal together but were fixing up a very authentic English student meal consisting of pre-made tomato sauce and pasta. Among other things we discussed where they were headed to and what they studied (one specialised in Portuguese at university) and tried to persuade them to eat pastel de nata (who knows why this was necessary!).
The wine was consumed after a while, and we were ready to sleep, so we parted ways. We didn’t get the Mancunians’ names, but I hope they make the jump from conchiglie to natas/sardinha/bifana/bacalhau et ceterão.
– Alfie