The recipe of the Belem cakes, the best guarded secret of Portugal

Flour, oil, eggs, milk and secrecy, lots of secrecy. Only six people in the world know the exact recipe of the “Pasteis de Belem” (Belem cakes), which is shrouded in mystery.

The cakes made of puff pastry and cream, which have become a symbol of Lisbon, can only be eaten in the Portuguese capital. The only place they are sold always served fresh, warm and with sugar and cinnamon added to taste is in the “Pasteis de Belem” coffee shop, a familyrun business for generations.

Although no cafe in the country lacks the cream cakes, essencially the same as those found in Belem but for slight differences in taste and texture, the latter have earned worldwide reputation.

Each day some 20,000 of these cakes are sold to customers from Portugal and all over the world, most from Spain and Brazil.

In the past years the number of Portuguese customers has fallen, a decrease compensated by the growing numbers of tourists visiting Lisbon, to the extent that foreigners make up 40 percent of the coffee shop’s clients.

It is a Monday in the fall and although the months with most visitors are in the summer, at the door of the cafe there is a long line of people speaking English, Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese or German.

They all wait patiently to taste one of these sweets they have heard so much about or read about in travel guides.

The cafe can seat 400 people in several rooms with big windows opening on a patio that lets the sun in.

“75 percent of what we sell are Belem Cakes costing a little more than one euro ($1.25) each, and our gross turnover amounts to more than seven million euros ($8.75 million) yearly”, says Miguel Clarinha, who manages the business with his father and a cousin.

All three are privileged. As descendents of the Brazilian businessman who bought the recipe from a convent in the XIXth century, they know the secret formula of the cakes.

As the managers do not make the cream of the pastry, they have had no choice but to share the recipe with three more people, the socalled “Masters of the Secret”.

One of them is Carlos Martinez, who has worked 35 years for the company and has known the formula for the past eight years.

“I only make the pastry and the cream”, Carlos tells Efe, without giving any importance to the role he and his two colleagues, Eliseu and Victor, play in the company.

His family and friends know he has the recipe, but “they can ask as much as they want, they will never know”, he says laughingly.

When an employee becomes a “Master of the Secret” he gets a higher salary and signs a special confidentiality clause not to reveal the formula, the owners of the business explain.

In 1837 the ancestor of Miguel Clarinha opened the coffee shop and registered the brand “Pasteis de Belem” in the whole world.

Today they are millionaires and have turned the place into a machine to please the palate.

Miguel rules out exporting the cakes to the rest of Portugal or the world because “the pastry would have to be frozen and would lose its properties and taste”, becoming a flaw for the brand.