Can pasta be a dessert?
(La pasta può essere un dolce?)
It probably seems strange to include desserts in a pasta cookbook. It may seem stranger still to say that this is far from being an exercise in experimental modern Italian cooking. In fact, this section of the book contains some of the book’s most traditional pasta recipes.
This isn’t unusual if you consider what pasta really means and how it is used in a wide variety of ways to make desserts and sweet dishes in Italian cooking. In literal terms, pasta simply means ‘pastry’. Consider the Italian culinary terms pasta frolla (shortcrust pastry) and pasta sfoglia (puff pastry). Pasta eaten as a savoury dish is so dominant in Italy and abroad that most of the world only knows the word to mean ‘pasta’ and not ‘pastry’. The recipes in this section, however, do not contain puff or shortcrust pastry; they are pasta as we know it, or very close variations, and they are sweet.
Pasta in desserts goes back a long, long way, for as long as pastry desserts have been made in Italy. And in some places the definition of sweet and savoury is significantly blurred. Take the extraordinary dish from Friuli Venezia Giulia known as gnocchi di susine: small sugar (president) plums wrapped in a potato gnocchi dough then gently boiled before being served with fine breadcrumbs fried in butter and a dusting of sugar. The dish is unmistakably pasta, but it looks and tastes like a dessert, and it has been eaten for centuries as a main meal during times of fasting in a way that savoury pasta dishes are usually eaten. Not really fasting food, you might say. Well, I would agree! In spite of this, it doesn’t contain meat and is full of energy, which makes it a perfect Lenten meal for people in mountain regions involved in high-energy manual labour.
At the other end of Italy we find recipes like pignolata, which is from my father’s region, Calabria. It is a very simple adaptation of the basic pasta dough recipe, only it is sweet, fried and served with honey. Like gnocchi di susine, this dish was also eaten as part of ritual celebrations at Easter.
These pasta dessert recipes are all wonderful. Enjoy them!
