With their flaky pastry casing, creamy custard filling and brulee topping, Macau’s Portuguese egg tarts are as much a part of the Chinese enclave’s fabric as its casinos — but their origin is surprisingly British.
Across the city it is not uncommon to see long lines of tourists patiently queuing for the sweet treats, a sight that might not seem all that surprising given the former Portuguese colony’s most famous dessert is based on Lisbon’s equally renowned pastel de nata.
But the current craze for Portuguese-style egg tarts — which has spread across China and parts of Asia in recent years — owes much of its success to a Briton who blundered into the business.
Photo: AFP
The tale began three decades ago when Essex-born industrial pharmacist Andrew Stow opened Lord Stow’s bakery at the southern harborside village of Coloane.
“In 1989, recognizing there were no Western street-side bakeries... he decided to do something for the local Portuguese community, which was to create a pastel de nata for them,” said Eileen Stow, Andrew’s sister, who now manages the business.
With no original recipe for pastel de nata to use, Andrew experimented with a heavier British custard filling, based on a family recipe, and Portuguese pastry techniques.
The creation initially raised a few eyebrows among Andrew’s Portuguese friends in Macau, but the local Chinese community became hooked.
Courtesy of the British, Cantonese cuisine already had a version of an egg tart, made with shortcrust pastry and a more jelly-like filling.
“To differentiate it from what they recognized in dim sum, a dan tat [egg tart in Cantonese,] they call it a po tat,” meaning Portuguese egg tart, Eileen said.
The creamier, flakier, richer versions were a roaring success.
“That’s how it grew before the days of ‘likes’ online. It’s just word of mouth,” added Eileen, who took over the business after her brother’s death in 2006.
The business now churns out 21,000 handmade egg tarts per day from three bakeries in Macau, and it also boasts two franchises in Japan and Manila.
A string of rivals have cropped up in the last three decades in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.
One of the best-regarded Macau competitors was set up by Andrew’s ex-wife Margaret Wong.
She sold her recipe to KFC, which now offers Portuguese egg tarts at outlets across China, a move that has introduced Macau’s Portuguese-British hybrid to hundreds of millions more hungry mouths.
When 17-year-old Lin Shih (林石) crossed the Taiwan Strait in 1746 with a group of settlers, he could hardly have known the magnitude of wealth and influence his family would later amass on the island, or that one day tourists would be walking through the home of his descendants in central Taiwan. He might also have been surprised to see the family home located in Wufeng District (霧峰) of Taichung, as Lin initially settled further north in what is now Dali District (大里). However, after the Qing executed him for his alleged participation in the Lin Shuang-Wen Rebellion (林爽文事件), his grandsons were
A jumbo operation is moving 20 elephants across the breadth of India to the mammoth private zoo set up by the son of Asia’s richest man, adjoining a sprawling oil refinery. The elephants have been “freed from the exploitative logging industry,” according to the Vantara Animal Rescue Centre, run by Anant Ambani, son of the billionaire head of Reliance Industries Mukesh Ambani, a close ally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The sheer scale of the self-declared “world’s biggest wild animal rescue center” has raised eyebrows — including more than 50 bears, 160 tigers, 200 lions, 250 leopards and 900 crocodiles, according to
They were four years old, 15 or only seven months when they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Ravensbruck. Some were born there. Somehow they survived, began their lives again and had children, grandchildren and even great grandchildren themselves. Now in the evening of their lives, some 40 survivors of the Nazi camps tell their story as the world marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most notorious of the death camps. In 15 countries, from Israel to Poland, Russia to Argentina, Canada to South Africa, they spoke of victory over absolute evil. Some spoke publicly for the first
I am kneeling quite awkwardly on a cushion in a yoga studio in London’s Shoreditch on an unseasonably chilly Wednesday and wondering when exactly will be the optimum time to rearrange my legs. I have an ice-cold mango and passion fruit kombucha beside me and an agonising case of pins and needles. The solution to pins and needles, I learned a few years ago, is to directly confront the agony: pull your legs out from underneath you, bend your toes up as high as they can reach, and yes, it will hurt far more initially, but then the pain subsides.
RSS