Pastéis de Tentúgal

There's a moment when you're stretching this dough that feels like a small miracle. The mass in your hands becomes translucent, so thin you can see the grain of the wooden table beneath it. That's when you know you've done it right. That's when you understand why the Carmelite nuns of Tentúgal guarded this recipe for four hundred years.

I learned about these pastries not from Avó Leonor (she was Alentejana, more bread than pastry) but from a trip to Coimbra when I was documenting convent sweets for my cookbook. An elderly woman named Dona Emília, whose grandmother had worked in the convent kitchens, showed me how to stretch the dough across a floured tablecloth until it became almost invisible. "Se consegues ler através dela, está pronta," she said. If you can read through it, it's ready.

The filling is doce de ovos, that impossibly rich egg yolk custard that defines Portuguese convent baking. The nuns had access to egg whites from the wine industry (used for clarifying) and found themselves with mountains of yolks. From scarcity came invention. From invention came these pastries that shatter at the first bite and leave you reaching for another.

This is not a quick recipe. This is a Sunday afternoon with nowhere else to be. Put on music. Pour yourself a glass of wine. Let the dough rest. Let yourself rest. The nuns had centuries to perfect this; you can take an afternoon.