Sericaia com ameixas de Elvas

The story

Sericaia is a convent dessert of the Alentejo in southern Portugal: a custard of milk, egg yolks, sugar and a little flour, lightened with beaten egg whites, spooned into a dish, dusted heavily with cinnamon and baked until it puffs and splits open on top. Nobody agrees on its origin. One account says it came from the East in the sixteenth century with D. Constantino de Bragança, who governed Portuguese India. Two Alentejo convents claimed it, Chagas de Cristo in Vila Viçosa and Santa Clara in Elvas, and an Elvas recipe book of 1623 records that it traveled from Malacca to Goa with the Jesuits and reached Santa Clara in 1584 through Sister Maria da Purificação. It was baked on tin plates, later on faience, in a baker's wood-fired oven whose high heat opened the typical cracks. The plums came much later. In the 1970s Elvas began serving sericaia with the town's sweet plums in syrup, a pairing credited to Mário Conceição and the director of the Pousada de Elvas. Bake it the morning of a dinner and serve it at room temperature; prunes simmered in syrup stand in well for the Elvas plums.