Coscorões

The smell of hot oil and cinnamon sugar is the smell of Carnaval. Before Lent arrived with its fasting and restraint, there was Entrudo: days of excess, of eating everything you wouldn't eat for forty days, of filling the house with fried doughs and sweets.

Coscorões were the heart of it. Avó Leonor would start making them the week before Carnaval, the kitchen transformed into a production line. My cousins and I were put to work twisting the strips of dough while she managed the pot of hot oil with the confidence of someone who'd done this a thousand times. We'd eat them warm, still dusty with cinnamon sugar, burning our tongues because we couldn't wait.

The secret is in the thinness. Everyone thinks they've rolled the dough thin enough. They haven't. Roll it until you think it will tear, then roll it a little more. When you hold it up to the light and can almost see through it, you're close. This is what makes the difference between coscorões that shatter when you bite them and coscorões that just crunch. You want the shatter.

I've documented coscorões from Minho to the Algarve, and every region has its opinion. Some add milk. Some use olive oil instead of butter. Some splash in vinho branco instead of aguardente. All of them are right. This is my grandmother's version, the one that tastes like childhood to me. Make it yours.