It sits behind the window displays of snack bars and pastry shops, next to the bread in bakeries, in convents and on the menus of restaurants with white linen tablecloths every day. Few recipes are as ubiquitous in Portugal as the rissole, the beloved fried savoury snack with which we proudly smear our fingers in the morning along with a cup of coffee, which we eat with rice at lunch or which helps us to delay our hunger in the restaurant before our food arrives. Geometric, golden, crispy. A semicircle that always seems to long for completion, as if one half were missing. But the rissol is whole at its core. Light in size, heavy in heritage, filled with stories that go far beyond the kitchen. A testament to our culinary identity — to a tradition that endures and reinvents itself.