Azevia

Description: Fried pastry, about 8 cm long and half-moon shaped, covered with sugar and cinnamon. The dough is made with flour, eggs, lard, olive oil, water and salt. You can take orange juice. It fills with jam.

Region: Alentejo.

Other names: Farto.

Variants: Grain Azevia. Sweet Potato Azevia. Azevia de Gila. Bean Azevia.

Particularity: Fried pastry, consisting of an outer layer of tender dough in the shape of a half-moon, flat and elongated, filled with jam, usually chickpeas, sweet potato or gila. These sweets can also take almonds.

History: Azevia is a fish similar to flounder. Between this fried sweet and the aforementioned fish there is only the coincidence of the shape — flat and elongated. It is a pastry in which the base of tender dough is the same for all fillings. Being one of the very typical «fritos» of Carnival, it was usual to fill it with pieces of cotton to offer to the people with whom one wanted to play. As these stories are part of the oral tradition of this region, they are still referenced in time. Thus, this sweet is mentioned both in the Refectory Notebooks and in the Recipe Book of the Convent of Santa Clara and its expansion to re-gional sweets is due to the extinction of religious orders with the corresponding secularization of recipes.

Use: As a treat, at any time of the day, and especially at Christmas and Carnival.

Know-how: Pour the flour into a container and scald with the hot fats. Add water or orange juice, knead and let it rest so that the dough is elastic. Roll it out, place piles of jam, fold the dough, join the edges, cut out and fried. Drain and rinse with sugar and cinnamon.

Source: Produtos tradicionais portugueses, Lisboa, DGDR, 2001