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Comment by galfarragem | Hacker News Reader

These "Portugal cakes", if still exist, are not popular in Portugal. We still have recipes of cakes and breads with raisins but the orange flower water, I’ve never heard about it. It might be a recipe branch that grew independently taking Portuguese traditional ingredients (raisins, oranges and fortified wine) and didn't survived in Portugal.

Nowadays the most Portuguese pastry is by far:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastel_de_nata

They are easily available in Portuguese emigrant neighbourhoods all over the world. Give it a try, you'll not regret it.

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It says here:

http://www.theoldfoodie.com/2010/04/portugal-cakes.html

That the name is something to do with oranges.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastel_de_nata

Interesting. I've had those in "Chinese" Dim Sum restaurants, but while they were clearly atypical for Chinese food, I had no idea they were originally Portuguese.

Strongly second the recommendation. They're delicious!

Macau, a former Portuguese colony, is full of these pastries. This may be how they entered China...

Indeed, they were popularized in Hong Kong via Macau:

    Custard tarts derived from the Portuguese pastry were
    introduced in Hong Kong in the 1940s by cha chaan tengs
    via the Portuguese colony of Macau.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egg_tart#History

I have been told by Chinese acquaintances that you can get them all over Shanghai. Not sure if it is true.

I think it's true, I heard also that they are quite easy to find in China.

Other places where for sure you can find them:

Paris (and other cities in france), Brussels, Luxembourg, Newark (US), Toronto, Petersham (Sydney), Poland (at Biedronka, a Portuguese supermarkets chain), Macau and other Portuguese ex-colonies.

And many cities in Germany. If it would just for them I would never be homesick. :)

These Pasteles de Nata are amazing, indeed.

"Pastéis de Nata" would be the plural form. Yes, they are amazing. I never understood why they were not more popular in Massachusetts, given the huge Portuguese population there.

Pasteis de Nata/Belem are most common from Lisbon on south to the Algarve. Most of the Portuguese in Massachussetts are from Porto or from the Azores/Madeira. You are more likely to find Lisboetas in New Jersey and Toronto.

Pasteis de Nata are one of my favorite foods of all time, but they were fairly uncommon where I grew up in an Azorean Portuguese community in California, although Queijadas are pretty similar.

That makes a lot of sense. But still, it is pretty rare over there. Search for "pastel de nata" on yelp for Cambridge shows only 5 results, and only restaurants who happen to have them. Not one single pastry/coffee shop.

What I think it's funny is how the Portuguese focused so much on working as real estate developers/contractors and basically never took the entrepreneurial spirit to any other industry. If I were in MA, I would look into getting a coffee shop that served only a good european-style espresso, pastéis de nata e ginjinha. I bet it would find a good number of customers.

The plural is "Pasteis de Nata". The usual way to make the plural in words ending in "el" is replacing it with "eis". "Hotel" and "Pincel" turn into "Hoteis" and "Pinceis".

Are you from Lisbon (or near) ?

Yeah. Why do you ask?

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