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Did You Know?

Lisbon Sent Out a Questionnaire and Accidentally Invented a Science

One bakery in Lisbon sells more than 20,000 custard tarts a day.

The Fábrica de Pastéis de Belém opens at eight in the morning and closes at eleven at night. Twenty thousand tarts across fifteen hours works out at roughly twenty-two a minute, sustained, all day, every day. On busy weekends the number can double, and at peak the shop has reported over 50,000 in a single day.

They have been doing it since 1837, to the same recipe.

The origin is a chain of small practical decisions. Monks at the Jerónimos Monastery used egg whites to starch clothes and clarify wine, which left them with a great many yolks. They turned the yolks into custard tarts and sold them to travellers arriving by steamboat. When the Liberal Revolution led to the closure of Portuguese monasteries in 1834, the monks sold the recipe to the sugar refinery next door. Three years later the refinery's owners opened a shop.

The recipe has never been published. It is known to a small number of pastry chefs, who make the tarts in a room the shop calls the secret workshop. Every other custard tart in Portugal — and there are many, in every café in the country — is a pastel de nata. Only the ones made in that building are pastéis de Belém.

There is even a proverb attached: a bride who eats one will never take off her ring. Couples turn up in wedding dress.

The date that shaped Lisbon, though, is much older than the bakery. On the morning of 1 November 1755 — All Saints' Day, with the churches full — an earthquake estimated at magnitude 8.5 to 9 struck off the coast of Portugal. The shaking lasted between three and six minutes and opened fissures five metres wide in central Lisbon. About forty minutes later a tsunami roughly six metres high came up the harbour. Then the candles that had toppled in the churches set fire to what was left.

What happened next is the interesting part.

On 26 January 1756, the Marquis of Pombal sent the bishops of Portugal a set of thirteen questions, to be copied and passed to every parish priest, who was to put them to his parishioners. What time did it start? How long did the shaking last? How many waves, and how far apart? Did it seem to come from a direction? Did the sea rise first, or fall? Did the animals behave strangely?

The questionnaire made no mention of God at all. Pombal wanted observations, not theology.

646 responses came back. They are still in the national archive. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, seismologists used those answers — collected by village priests from farmers and fishermen — to reconstruct and model the 1755 tsunami. One of the faults proposed as its source is now named after him.

Pombal also rebuilt the Baixa on a timber cage — the gaiola pombalina — among the first deliberately earthquake-resistant buildings anywhere. He tested the design by building small wooden models and marching troops around them to simulate the shaking. Asked why the new streets were so absurdly wide, he said: "One day they will be small."

The clock: Lisbon sits at 9° west and runs on the same time as London, which is roughly correct for its longitude and puts it a full hour behind Madrid, 500 kilometres away.

Portugal has tested the alternative. Twice. From 1966 to 1976, and again from 1992 to 1996, the country moved to Central European Time to line up with Spain and most of continental Europe. Solar noon drifted to around half past one. In winter the sun came up mid-morning; in summer it was still light past ten at night.

Parents' associations killed it. Children were going to school in the dark and then refusing to go to bed because it was still bright outside. In February 1996 the prime minister announced Portugal was going back.

Lisbon ran the experiment Madrid is still living in. The first time it lasted ten years; the second, four. A city that has made one pastry to one unchanged recipe since 1837, and changed its national time zone four times in thirty.