MUST PASTE

(Mostarda)

1.4 litres/2½ pints of fresh juice from white table or wine grapes

50 g/2 oz wood ash

75 g/3 oz corn flour

Zest of 1 lemon, orange, or tangerine

65 g/2 oz pine nuts, toasted

65 g/2 oz almonds, toasted and coarsely chopped

75 g/3 oz raisins

Lemon juice

Put the juice in a stainless steel or enamelled saucepan. Stir in the wood ash (theoretically this should be ash made from burning the prunings of the grape vines, but I doubt that this is absolutely necessary; it might be wise to avoid ash from any particularly aromatic woods), bring to a full boil, and remove from the heat. Allow to stand for 24 hours.

Filter this must through very fine muslin or a paper filter, ladling it out from the pot with care so as not to disturb the sediments that the ash has carried to the bottom. Measure cups of the filtered must, and add them slowly to the corn flour in a saucepan, stirring to eliminate any lumps. Add the zest and cook over a very low heat, stirring constantly, until the mostarda is very thick and comes away from the sides of the pan as you stir. Remove the zest and blend in the nuts and raisins.

Wet the moulds (or use plates) with a little lemon juice and pour in the mostarda. Allow to dry for twenty-four hours in the sun. Turn the mostarda over on the plate or in the mould and allow the underside to dry, turning it from side to side in the sun for several days longer. Put under cover at night to avoid the dew. Store in a cool, dry place (cut into pieces first if you have used plates). It eventually becomes very hard indeed—if, that is, it manages to survive the forays of the family.

Waverley Root says that the mostarda he ate in the province of Messina had lots of cinnamon in it, but this is not the custom in the western part of the island. He also says it had mustard in it, but that is quite impossible, since despite the Arabic recipe for wine on page 89, mustard is now totally unknown to Sicilian cooking.

Today cotognata is a modest treat, but not so in the fourteenth century. According to the accounts of Francesco Datini, a merchant who lived in Prato at this time, a pound of comfits or of crushed sugar cost thirty-six times as much as a pound of beef, and a marzipan torte was more expensive than a brace of peacocks. Such high prices also explain why, in an age in which the chroniclers are usually quite indifferent to what is being eaten, the confectionery is carefully itemised.

The entertainments of this day consisted in diverse dances performed by the Ladies with the Knights, which were opened by the groom and the bride. Said dances were interspersed with pauses for a most excellent refreshment of sweets, brought on in this order.

There appeared at one end of the corridor, through a door that leads to the rooms of the Palace, milord the Marchese della Favara with 25 gentlemen, each carrying a bowl of silver, full of comfits and of diverse sorts of fruit with sugar statues adorned by banners of silver and gold with the coats of arms of the bride and groom, upon these followed milord the Conte di Raccuia with 25 other gentlemen and as many bowls; then came milord the Conte di Cammarata with the third formation, and finally milord the Marchese d’Avola; and these four masters of ceremony were also accompanied by cup-bearers with pitchers of drinks.

Don Bernardino Masbelli, The Wedding of Donna Anna d’Aragona and Don Giovanni Ventimiglia, Marchese di Gerace, 1574

Sicilian sugar had its heyday in the fifteenth century, when vast fortunes were made from its production and export. The expulsion of the Jews in 1492 meant the loss of both capital and skilled labour and in the following decades much of the island’s remaining capital was immobilised in the creation of feudal holdings. Despite the consequent decline in sugar production, Sicily remained self-sufficient throughout the sixteenth century, and even exported small amounts from mills like the one described by a traveller in 1568:

Whosoever enters in one of these will think to have entered the forges of Vulcan, so great and so steady appear the fires by which the sugar hardens and is refined. And so also those men who work steadfastly here are so sooty, so dirty, so filthy and seared with heat that they seem more demon than human.

Leandro Alberti, Descrittione di tutta l’ltalia, 1568

Sicily continued to produce sugar with occasionally greater but mostly lesser success until the end of the eighteenth century. But the quantity was insufficient, and from the seventeenth century on, Sicily’s sweet tooth had to be satisfied by imported sugar.

Tastes were changing too. The comfits and preserves evolved into something known as dolci di riposto, cupboard sweets, which kept well and could be ordered in quantity to provide for unexpected visits. Somewhat like petits fours in appearance, dolci di riposto are made of almond paste and filled with dates or with quince, fig, or citron preserves, iced in pastel colours and topped with a silvered comfit.

Comfits and sugar statues survive as ritual treats. As in many parts of Catholic Europe, Sicilians still mark the important rites of passage by distributing sugared almonds tied up in little tulle pouches and coloured according to the occasion: pink or blue for baptism, white for first communion and marriage, green for engagement, red for a university diploma, silver for the twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The intricate allegorical centrepieces made of sugar that adorned the banquets of Renaissance and baroque Europe have given way to gaudy sugar statuettes—paladins, ballerinas, carabinieri, and even cowboys and Mickey Mouses—the pupi di cena that are sold at the Fair of the Dead. (Claudia Roden describes similar sugar dolls, which she remembers being sold for the celebration of the sacrifice of the Bride of the Nile when she was a child in Egypt.)

In the eighteenth century “banqueting stuff ” disappeared from the refreshment table, be it at princely balls or at public festivities, such as those held in honour of a royal birth:

In the evening the park was illuminated, in such manner as to appear almost beyond recognition. And without hyperbole it even seemed a theatre of paradise. Add to all this the musical entertainment, which could be heard from two orchestras with goodly number of instrumentalists, sitting in circles around the fountains, to the extreme pleasure of the joyful audience; and add the vast number of masked figures who were dancing continuously… in the squares about the fountains and in the centre of the avenues, and add finally the six public stalls or refreshment stands, whence were offered gratis to the people splendid refreshments of ices, wines, liqueurs, melons and pastries, as if they were so many small cuccagnas.

Marchese di Villabianca, Diario palermitano, 1772

As sugar was transformed from spice to basic ingredient and began to disappear from the first and second (or first thirty) courses—a development that, as we have seen, was never quite completed in Sicily—the art of pastry making came into its own. In much of southern Italy this art received a convent education. The long and delightful ode that the Abbot Giovanni Meli wrote to celebrate the “sweet things” of Palermo’s convents, of which the verses opening this chapter give but a taste, indicates the degree of specialised excellence in pastry to which the nuns of Sicily had attained by the end of the eighteenth century.

No writer whom I have consulted offers any explanation for this phenomenon. The universal if questionable cliché of the frustrated female consoling herself with a box of chocolates or a cream-filled éclair has little application here, since the bulk of the pastries were given away. The pastries that the nuns produced, like the bread made for Saint Joseph’s Day, offered women of very restricted lives a rare outlet for creativity, and both would provide interesting material for the study of the relationship between women, food, and religion. I can only venture to suggest that what was originally a humble offering of one’s own labour, considered proper to a woman vowed to poverty, maintained this air of suitability and propriety even when it became quite out of hand. For, whatever lay behind its origins, by the nineteenth century the production of pastries within the convents of the island had reached quite startling proportions.

The convents themselves had multiplied in a remarkable fashion. Many of them had been founded in the sixteenth century to provide refuge for “ill-married” women and repentant prostitutes. The Repentite, founded in 1524, was an early example of this, although by 1700 it had become a proper convent in which only virgins were allowed to profess their vows and try their hand at making cassate and other sweets.

Others were of much older and more aristocratic origin. One of these was Santa Trinità del Cancelliere, a Cistercian convent that had been founded in 1190 by the Royal Chancellor Matteo d’Ajello, and that admitted only ladies of noble birth. These aristocratic nuns, or rather the servants they supervised, were famous for their fedde. In their original version, these pastries must have looked something like clamshells. They were made in oval hinged moulds that were lined with pasta reale and then filled with apricot jam and egg custard. When the mould was closed the two sheets of almond paste came together and a bit of the filling oozed out: the results, Sicilian writers never fail to observe, bore a remarkable resemblance to female genitals.

This primal version of the fedde was replaced sometime during the last century by a completely different one, for which I give the recipe as I found it in two different Sicilian cookbooks. In each case the old-fashioned measures indicated that it had been copied from an older source, possibly without being tried out, and the directions were somewhat vague. The results I achieved were heavy and unappetising, and it is easy to understand why even with this later version of the confection only the name has escaped oblivion. Fedde, in fact, is a Sicilian word that here actually means “slices” (the Italian is fette), but it has another meaning, one that has provided great entertainment to generations of Palermitani.