Unfortunately we had to cut short our visit to Germany when we received the news that D. Aurora, Filomena’s mother had passed away. She has been sick for over 7 years and finally she succumbed to the disease.
This time we spend most of the time in Figueira helping Belinha and Filomena with their bereavement and the bureaucracy linked to an event like that. A few relatives came to attend the funeral and Aurora rests now with her beloved husband Júlio at the Figueira da Foz cemetery.
Near Figueira da Foz there is a village called Tentugal famous for its cakes (Pasteis de Tentugal), a sweet made with eggs and pastry. It was created by the Nuns in the convent of Tentugal. We normally stop at Tentugal and have a few of these Pasteis and this time was no exception. In the Portuguese cuisine there are a great number of cakes made with egg yolk and linked with religious organisations such as convents and monasteries. I read somewhere the reason for that being that egg whites were used as starch when ironing the clothes and obviously being a predominately Christian country there were lots of priests and nuns parading their immaculately ironed vests.
Not knowing what to do with the left over egg yolks they invented all sorts of cakes to consume them. I am not sure if this is true but sounds believable and it is another useless fact to overload our brains.
In the next page we show a series of photos of the time we spent in Figueira da Foz.
