BAKED CASSATA

(Cassata al Forno)

Makes one 30 cm/12 inch cassata

PASTA FROLLA CRUST

425 g/15 oz flour

200 g/7 oz sugar

175 g/6 oz lard

Rind of 1 lemon, grated

5 egg yolks

RICOTTA-CREAM FILLING

685 g/1¾ lbs fresh ricotta, well drained

350 g/12 oz sugar

75 g/3 oz plain chocolate pieces

50 g/2 oz cup zuccata or candied citron

To prepare the crust, sift together the flour and the sugar, cut in the lard, add the grated lemon rind, and work in the egg yolks. Work the dough just enough to amalgamate all the ingredients and shape them into a ball (should the dough be too dry to hold together properly, a scant teaspoon of milk or of white wine can be added). Refrigerate for at least 2 hours.

Prepare the ricotta cream according to the directions in the cuccìa recipe.

Knead the dough on a floured surface for about a minute and then roll out two-thirds of it into a circle large enough to line the bottom and sides of a 30 cm/12 inch pie dish. Fill the lined dish with the ricotta cream, roll out the remaining dough to make a lid, and place it over the cream. Seal the edges of the pie and decorate the top with scraps of the remaining dough. With a fork poke some vents in the upper crust. Bake in a preheated 180C/350F/gas mark 4 oven for 30 minutes or until the crust is lightly coloured. Serve cold.

Note: Pasta frolla is the basic Sicilian pastry crust, which comes in many different degrees of sweetness and richness (see, for example, the difference between the cuddureddi and bucellato pastries in the first chapter). I have respected these differences, which are not haphazard but are governed by both culinary and economic considerations—the filling that the pastry is to embrace and the table that it is to grace—and therefore I use the term pasta frolla to indicate a process rather than a specific list of ingredients.

Both these recipes call for zuccata, which in turn calls for an explanation. Zuccata, or in Sicilian cucuzzata, is made from the cucuzza, a squash that is proverbial for its lack of character yet much beloved by Sicilians. It is a summer squash, long, thin, smooth of skin and pale green in colour. A mythical and frugal mother superior is said to have discovered that the cucuzza that had lain neglected in the convent garden until it had grown enormously thick and as hard as granite could by dint of week-long soaking and cooking be saved from waste and used as a preserve.

Sometimes spiced with cinnamon or with rosewater, zuccata lurks at the heart of some of Sicily’s best cakes and pastries. It is somehow reminiscent of Turkish delight, leading one to suspect that it was known to the harem long before it hit the convent. (The techniques for preserving and candying fruit, together with those for making sugared comfits, are in fact an Arabic legacy that Sicily put to excellent use in later centuries.) The preserves are easy to make, and a recipe for them follows; I confess to less success in candying whole pieces of the squash. The recipe that called for three days of work went bad; the one requiring ten days survived but smelled like old tennis shoes; and since no one in my family much likes candied fruit anyway, I declined to attempt the recipe that would—like the Flood—have kept me busy for forty days.