I first came across pictures of this “Anti-Gluttony Door”, rather charmingly called a porta pega-gordo (or “fat catcher door”) — located in Portugal’s Alcobaça Monastery — designed to shame their fat monks into dieting whilst they could eat nothing only, as the Latin title of this piece says…
silently eating the sins of the people
…back in January 2021, only to have it thoroughly debunked by someone called the Fake History Hunter, later in October, when looking into the whole background of “sin eaters” (a different piece to this, one to come out later).
For some of us (no names, no pack drill, whispers Chris), such a door over here could have come as a nasty shock after the Covid impact.
That it is a myth, doesn’t make its history any less interesting though. The opening is actually 50 centimetres (1.6 ft) wide and was meant to pass plates through from the kitchen to the refectory, almost a fore-runner then of those serving hatches so beloved of English builders and architects for houses built between the two World Wars.
Pretty much every house we lived in as kids had one of these. Not always used much maybe, but there all the same. I imagine they’ve pretty much all been bricked over now, or the wall later demolished to make things more “open plan”, a layout something beloved of the 70s designers.