Macau and the Portuguese Egg Tart

Macau lies on the western side of the Pearl River estuary, across from Hong Kong, and from the middle of the sixteenth century it was the Portuguese trading settlement on the south China coast. It remained under Portuguese administration until 1999, and for much of that time it was a small port where Cantonese, Portuguese and the cooks of Portugal's other ports met in the same kitchens. The cooking of the place grew from that long coexistence, and its best-known sweet, the egg tart, belongs to the story of the territory's twentieth century.

The Portuguese brought to the Pearl River delta the ingredients and habits of their wider maritime world: salt cod, olive oil, wheat bread, sweet egg pastries and an ease with spice gathered at their stations in Africa, India and Southeast Asia. In Macau these met Cantonese technique and the produce of the delta, the fish, the shellfish, the rice and the soy sauce, and the result is usually called Macanese cooking. It is the home cooking of the Macanese community, in which a Portuguese dish may be seasoned with turmeric, coconut or soy sauce, and a Cantonese method may be applied to a Portuguese ingredient. The egg tart is the best-known product of this meeting, and it should be described carefully. Portugal has a long tradition of convent and pastry-shop sweets made from egg yolks and sugar, and the small custard tart of Belem, near Lisbon, is its most famous form. The Macau tart is a related but distinct pastry: a small shell holding a smooth egg custard baked until its surface is blistered and lightly caramelised. Its custard is lighter and less sweet than the Lisbon original, which suits the Cantonese taste for sweets of delicacy rather than weight. Accounts of its exact maker and date vary, and it is safest to say only that it took its present form in Macau in the later twentieth century and then spread. The tart travelled to Hong Kong and through the Cantonese diaspora, where the bakery and the tea restaurant adopted it alongside their own pastries. There a second, separate tradition of egg tart already existed: the Cantonese dan tat, made in a short, crumbly shortcrust shell or in flaky layered pastry, filled with a plain, trembling custard. The two are often confused, but they differ in pastry, in the finish of the custard and in the way they are eaten. The Macau version has a laminated shell and a scorched top, while the Cantonese has a clean pale custard under a pastry of buttery crumb. The Cantonese kitchen did not copy the Portuguese pastry. It kept the idea of a baked egg custard, adjusted its sweetness and its texture, and placed it among the small sweet dishes of the teahouse. Macau therefore shows how a trading port can pass a dish between two culinary systems without either losing its own character.

The egg tart is eaten warm, within the hour of baking, when the shell is crisp and the custard still soft, and in Macau and Hong Kong it is taken with tea or coffee as a small sweet between meals. Its character lies in the contrast of brittle, buttery pastry with a custard that is sweet but light, and in the faint bitterness of the caramelised surface. In Macanese homes the same mingling shows at the table in dishes of salt cod, roast meats and rice, seasoned with soy sauce, spice and olive oil in a combination found nowhere else.