Marco Carvalho
The Macau Cardinal Newman Center of Cultural and Performance Arts will once again highlight Portuguese culture. Located on Calçada da Vitória, not far from Hotel Royal, the Center will host a seminar, on February 27th, on the origins of Portuguese bread. The participants will be able to taste or take home a piece of Saint Lawrence’s bread and a “Jesuit”, one of Portugal’s most beloved flaky pastry.
First it was Portuguese music, now bread and traditional sweets. The Macau Cardinal Newman Center of Cultural and Performance Arts, located on Calçada da Vitória, continues to invest heavily in the spread of Portuguese culture and will promote on February 27th a lecture on the Portuguese art of baking bread and leavened dough.
The workshop, which will be conducted in Cantonese, will address specifically the relationship between Catholicism and the Portuguese baking tradition. Flora Chan, a local musicologist who studied ethnomusicology in Portugal and was the first researcher to study the musical heritage of the Macanese community, will try to explain why delicacies such as the “Jesuits” – a very popular flaky pastry – and “Saint Lawrence’s bread” acquired the name they bear.
The lecture, called “Olá Bakery Talk”, takes place on February 27th, starting from 3 pm, and is the second initiative that the Cardinal Newman Center of Cultural and Performance Arts will dedicate to the culture of Portugal, after having organized a Portuguese traditional music soirée in 2020: “We have been trying to organize a series of seminars and lectures on Portuguese culture. We organized a first lecture on Portuguese music in 2020. The one we will host at the end of the month is about Portuguese bread. It is the first seminar of a gastronomic nature that the Cardinal Newman Center of Cultural and Performance Arts aims to organize as part of our humble effort to help promote the culture of Portugal,” Cecilia Cheong, a spokesperson for the Newman Cultural Center, told O Clarim.
Costing 100 patacas, the initiative will offer the participants not only the opportunity to discuss the origin of some of the most popular breads in Portugal, but also to taste them. The center hopes to attract about four dozen participants: “The lecture will focus on the origin of different kinds of breads and delicacies such as the ‘Jesuits’ and ‘Saint Lawrence’s bread’. We will not prepare these delicacies in our facilities, but the speaker will bring with her the bread and cake I just mentioned, so that the participants can taste them with a cup of coffee. The cost of registration covers the two units of bread. We hope that about four dozen people will join us,” Cecilia Cheong concludes.
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