ALMOND CURLS

(Biscotti Ricci)

Makes 4 dozen

675 g/1½ lb whole blanched almonds

900g/2 lb sugar

8 egg whites

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

Grated rind of 1 lemon

Grate the almonds to a fine meal in a nut grater or a blender, and mix in the sugar. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, and then fold them into the almonds together with the cinnamon and the lemon rind. Mix well and put the dough into a pastry bag with a large notched nozzle. Preheat oven to 150C/300F/gas mark 2. Squeeze the dough out onto a greased and floured baking tray in 7.5 cm/3 inch S-shaped curlicues, spacing them about 2.5 cm/1 inch apart. Bake until the ridges on the biscuits begin to colour.

The Badia dello Spirito Santo in Agrigento still accepts orders for a much-admired cucus dolce tasting of almonds and of pistachios. The original recipe is said to have called for equal weights of wheat and pistachios.

At Erice the nuns were famous for their dolci di riposto. Carlo Levi describes buying some right after the last world war:

We wanted to taste the famous cakes of almond paste and the mustazzoli made by the nuns of a cloistered convent. We entered the atrium and expressed our wishes to a sort of shadow behind a double grate and shortly, without any accompanying words, the pastries appeared on the wheel, tender flowers of green and pink and violet and azure, and we left our money in their place.

Carlo Levi, Le parole sono pietre, 1951

The nuns of this convent of San Carlo have since died or gone elsewhere, and the convent is now a gallery, but Maria Grammatico, who was a lay worker in their kitchens for fifteen years, has opened her own pastry shop. She continues to make exquisitely iced dolci di riposto filled with homemade citron preserves, and a bewilderingly large assortment of delicious almond cakes and biscuits.

The nuns of Santa Chiara in Noto, inspired perhaps by the putti that swarm about the churches and palaces of this most baroque of towns, invented a cake of marzipan and sponge covered with chocolate icing, on which they placed a pink-cheeked cherub’s face cut out of coloured tin foil.

It is only a few years since the nuns of the Badia Grande at Alcamo stopped selling bocconetti. When I first came to Sicily, my mother-in-law would send her eldest son to the abbey with a bag full of almonds from our farm, and he would go back a few days later and bring home a tray of almond bocconetti, each one stuffed with zuccata, sprinkled with icing sugar, and wrapped in tissue paper.

The complicated bookkeeping that became necessary when the value added tax was introduced in Italy discouraged the nuns from their commerce, but they still make small quantities of bocconetti as gifts, and the recipe survives.