Religious sweets, anthropophagic tasting

Museums are not mausoleums of historical, artistic, and scientific antiquities, more or less curious and interesting. Rather, they stand out for their ability—or inability—to scrutinize what has not yet been done or remains to be done, a constantly stimulating challenge to the creativity of their research teams, both within and beyond the collections they safeguard. Revisiting the past has many angles and many virtues, whether in museology, museography, or exhibition design, with or without cutting-edge technology, with the aim of attracting and, if possible, surprising or astounding repeat visitors and new audiences. Now, the fact that the Santo António Museum, located in one of Lisbon's most sought-after tourist spots, the Cathedral, has dared to go far beyond its traditional or traditionalist hagiographic purpose with this exhibition and this catalog deserves our applause, both for its notorious curiosity or intellectual voracity regarding the subject, and for having extended the scope of its investigation to the entire country—including Madeira and the Azores, which is not always the case.

The variety of forms created by Portuguese confectionery might also be of interest to the nearby Design Museum, or the National Museum of Ethnology, if it weren't already mired in a profound lethargy with no solution in sight. However, the merit of curators Paula Barata Dias and Cristina Oliveira Bastos, from the Center for Classical and Humanistic Studies at the University of Coimbra, should not be overlooked by the Museum's coordinator, Pedro Teotónio Pereira, who recognized that sweets, "a living heritage, so rich, fascinating, and delicious," could constitute "true museum pieces" (p. 4) as "an extraordinary—and sometimes unexpected—repository of Portuguese history and culture." The "barriga de freira" sweet, with its various versions, can be remembered as representative of this heritage. The angel papos "are common throughout the country" (p. 63), but in Amarante they acquired a particularly beautiful half-moon shape made of wafers dusted with sugar. Cavacas are also very common, in a variety of models that clearly distinguish their origin (see pp. 122-26).

However, the starting point was the correlation between Saint Anthony of Lisbon and Saint Gonçalo of Amarante, between the matchmaker of young girls and the marriage of "older ladies" (sic), between the blessed bread of Franciscan charity and the cavacas and euphemistic "tools," unmistakable symbols of virility shaped by the female hands that developed popular sweets. "The ancestral and traditional division of labor according to gender has undergone recent evolutions, but, as for cooking and the confectionery arts, food culture and heritage thrive on the work and dedication of women," write Paula Dias and Cristina Bastos on p. 7. Traces of a millennia-old syncretic paganism persisted in a "historically and culturally Christian" country, and the result is literally on the table, which during festive celebrations is covered with delicacies that are "anthroponymic metaphors" ready for "anthropophagic tasting" (p. 9). Assessing how the Christian religion built liturgical festivals based on the sacralization of bread—to the point, for example, of sculpting large processional platforms of truly striking decorative beauty—or established "practices of gratification, food sharing, and the offering of festive sweets, particularly to children, godchildren, and the elderly" (p. 22), the curators admit—however—that this ancient world is now greatly threatened, noting "its erosion in the territory and its invisibility as a cultural value inherent to Portuguese identity" (p. 23).

Title: “When the Body Becomes Sweet. Eroticism and Religiosity in Portuguese Confectionery” Authors: Paula Barata Dias and Cristina Oliveira Bastos Publisher: Lisbon Museum — Saint Anthony Design: Leonor Wagner Alvim Pages: 135

The decline in rural demographics and the existing community religious experiences are said to be responsible for this decline, in addition to the “chronic insensitivity” of ecclesiastical authorities to the religious function of these rituals, seen as “profane camps” and rustic practices of little symbolic value. This last interpretation could be considered biased, not only because the Church's influence has seen much better days, but also because, just a few pages later, they themselves postulate that the "sensuality and eroticism of conventual sweets" (sic) were inspired by readings of sacred texts and admit that the popular sweets that persisted after the abolition of the Orders in 1834 benefited from that culinary refinement through "nuns who returned to the lay state or, more frequently, servants or maids from those former houses who brought, upon their departure from the monastery, methods of making and reproducing the fine sweets, highly appreciated [...] and the object of great covetousness" (pp. 29-30). The nun's throat on pp. 66-67, the pitos of Santa Luzia on pp. 72-73, the queijada da Graciosa on pp. 100-101, the melindres of Arouca on p. 107 and—most of all—the sighs from Coimbra (and they could be from Guimarães or Braga) on pp. 108-9, leave no doubt as to the overflow of this recipe and its persistence to the present day. And as for the "invisibility as a cultural value" (that is, its presence in the daily lives of many), if there is blame, it should be attributed to the lack of commercial distribution beyond local circles, where, moreover, they would easily dominate the poor-quality industrial products found in every pastry shop or coffee shop. After all, where, far from their origin—Coimbra and Vila Nova da Barquinha—can one taste maminhas de freira or, if one has that taste, pirilaus de Santo Ambrósio (sweetened sweets from Santo Ambrósio) (pp. 59 and 96-97)?

A wide variety of votive breads, "humble in flavor and shape" (p. 33), made with wheat flour, a small amount of yeast, and water, and well-baked to last longer, after being blessed by a priest, are kept in homes as protective amulets for families, serving as a household altar until the following year's feast. Saint Anthony's Day is also celebrated with the purchase and donation of Saint Anthony's Bread in the cities he visited: Lisbon, Coimbra, and Padua. The votive bread of Saint Rita of Cassia accompanies the procession of the Lisbon parish of Saint Nicholas and is offered along with roses and prayer cards bearing the image of the 14th-century saint. The bread of the Holy Queen evokes the famous Miracle of the Roses and is distributed sliced ​​during the first week of July by the respective Confraternity, along with food baskets and other gifts to the poor and needy. During the third week of Easter, the bread of Saint Benedict is offered as a relic in Ançã, invoking a legendary gift from monks to the children and poor of the village, who shared the cheese and bread from their pilgrims' lunch there. Probably one of the best, the charolo de São Gonçalo, which is part of the saint's festival celebrated in mid-January in the village of Outeiro, municipality of Bragança, consists of a small float with five wooden poles—on which hang oranges, dried fruits, sausages, and golden sweet breads, in various shapes, such as a knight, a "roja" (a kind of bread roll), a man and woman arm in arm, and a man with his hand on his genitals—around which, to the sound of bagpipes, pairs of raised arms dance, the men with a "roja" (a kind of bread roll) threaded through one of them. The shapes of these sweet breads represent the goods to be protected: health and strength for men, love and marriage, virility and fertility; and at the end of the festival, an auction of the breads guarantees the following year's supply.