HONEY PUFFS

(Sfinci Ammilati)

Makes about 30 small sfinci

225 ml/8 fl oz water

50 g/2 oz lard

Pinch of salt

175 g/6 oz flour (see note)

5 eggs

Vegetable oil for frying

150 g/5 oz honey

Bring the water, lard, and salt to a boil in a saucepan. While the pan is still on the heat, sift the flour into the water, stirring as you go. Stir until well blended, remove from the heat, and allow to cool.

When the flour mixture has cooled, add the eggs one at a time, and beat at length until the mixture is smooth and lump-free.

Drop one tablespoon at a time into very hot oil (190C/375F) and fry slowly until the sfinci are puffed and a deep golden brown in colour. Drain on paper towels.

Heat the honey in a saucepan and dip the sfinci into the hot honey. Serve immediately.

Finally it should be noted that while the Origlione, the Martorana, and the Stigmata were all wealthy convents, which probably produced a great many of the ingredients for all these pastries on their own farmlands and could count on the allowances of their aristocratic residents to defray the expenses of the remaining ingredients, culinary fame was not denied the less privileged:

There were monasteries of inferior order, which could not allow themselves such luxury: and even they, in their modest spheres, enjoyed renown, be it for their scàcciu: roasted chickpeas, almonds, fava beans, and pumpkin seeds (the Cappuccines); be it for their stuffed olives (the Assumption).

And, since next to evil stands good, so, almost as a remedy for the inevitable indigestions provoked by so many pastries, cakes, cannoli, marzipans, creams, fritters, pizzas, olives and almonds, the Abbey of Saint Rosalia performed the merciful office of preparing a medicinal antacid, of guaranteed effectiveness.

Giuseppe Pitrè, La vita in Palermo cento e più anni fà, 1904

In the wake of Garibaldi’s expedition in 1860 and Sicily’s union with the Kingdom of Italy, the property of the Church, which amounted to one tenth of all the land in Sicily, was confiscated. Many of the religious orders were closed and those that survived were greatly impoverished. The scale on which the convents distributed their pastries was reduced in proportion to their circumstances—perhaps only at Christmas and Easter and only to close relatives or benefactors, such as the family of Fulco di Verdura, who remembers them arriving “on trays covered with multicoloured tissue paper and decorated with a tinsel fringe and gold and silver sugar pills.” It must have been at about this time that it became possible to order the various specialities for a fee or, in the beginning perhaps, a discreet donation to the convent’s coffers. Thus the Convent delle Vergini, stronghold of aristocratic splendour a century earlier, had become by the end of the nineteenth century a purveyor of sweets to aristocratic households.

Scorning the table of drinks, glittering with crystal and silver on the right, he moved left toward that of the sweetmeats. Huge blond babas, Mont Blancs snowy with whipped cream, cakes speckled with white almonds and green pistachio nuts, hillocks of chocolate-covered pastry, brown and rich as the topsoil of the Catanian plain from which, in fact, through many a twist and turn they had come, pink ices, champagne ices, coffee ices, all parfaits, which fell apart with a squelch as the knife cleft them, melody in major of crystallised cherries, acid notes of yellow pineapple, and those cakes called “triumphs of gluttony” filled with green pistachio paste, and shameless “virgins’ cakes” shaped like breasts. Don Fabrizio asked for some of these and, as he held them in his plate, looked like a profane caricature of St. Agatha…. Why ever didn’t the Holy Office forbid these cakes when it had the chance? St. Agatha’s sliced-off breasts sold by convents, devoured at dances! Well, well!

Giuseppe di Lampedusa, The Leopard, 1960

First made in Palermo’s Monastero delle Vergini,“virgin cakes” are more commonly and more outspokenly known as minni di virgini, or “virgins’ breasts.” From Palermo they have spread as far as Catania, where they are dedicated to the patron saint Agatha, who is always depicted holding the symbol of her martyrdom on a plate. The most notorious of all the convent pastries, minni di virgini owe their fame above all to their name, which so delights the Sicilians that they will apply it indiscriminately to almost any cake, provided it is small and rounded. The following recipe is, I believe, for virgins’ breasts as they were originally made in Palermo. The Catanians take things one step further and place a small red cherry on top.