Toucinho do céu

Toucinho do céu is a rich Portuguese sweet made with eggs and almonds. Its name means “heaven’s pork fat,” but some present-day methods of making it do not use pork. It is served as a moist, yellow cake dusted with powdered sugar.

In the method from Murça in northern Portugal, gila jam and ground almonds are added to a sugar syrup and cooked. After the mixture has cooled slightly, egg yolks are stirred in; it is then poured into a floured pan and baked, and dusted with powdered sugar once cool. The egg yolks and almonds form a dense batter, with the fibers of the gila mixed through it. Cooking the sugar into a syrup before adding the other ingredients sets it apart from cakes that are baked right after mixing.

Sweets with the same name are found in many places. In one example from the Alentejo region, eggs, sugar, butter, almonds and wheat flour are combined with cinnamon and cloves and baked in a round shape. It differs in both shape and aroma from the square, gila-filled sweet of Murça. It also differs in how the ingredients are used and in the finished result from Pudim Abade de Priscos, which uses pork fat cooked in sugar syrup.

As for why it is called “toucinho,” one explanation is that the sweet once contained pork fat, and another is that it resembled sweets made with pork fat. The name alone does not mean that every recette (proportions of ingredients and method) in use today contains pork fat.

In Guimarães, too, it has been handed down as a sweet of the Convent of Santa Clara. According to a local historian, a report on the 1884 industrial exhibition records that the convent exhibited this sweet as well as fruit cooked in sugar. In Murça, the sweets of the Benedictine nuns are said to have been passed down in the local community. There is also local testimony that Serafina Rosa Alves, who worked at the convent, inherited the method and passed it on to her grandchild. Among the sweets of the same name found in various places, this is an example distinctive to Murça.

Glossary