(Bocconetti di Mandorla)
Makes 3 dozen
450 g/1 lb shelled and blanched almonds
450 g/1 lb sugar
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
3 egg whites
Zuccata preserves or any other fairly firm preserves
Grind the almonds to a fairly fine meal. Stir in the sugar and then the vanilla. Beat the egg whites until soft peaks form, then fold them into the almonds. Mix well enough to have a workable paste. Shape a tablespoon of the mixture into a ball, poke a hole in it, and fill the hole with ½ teaspoon of preserves. Cover the hole with a little more of the almond mixture, and roll gently between the palms of your hands until it is a well-sealed ball little more than 2.5 cm/1 inch in diameter. Repeat with the rest of the almond mixture. Bake on greased and floured baking trays in a 150C/300F/gas mark 2 oven for about 25 minutes or until delicately browned.
Twenty years ago there were still two or three convents in Palermo that sold pastries. Today only the Benedictine sisters at the Monastero delle Virgini still do so, a handful of elderly sisters who work at the ovens that the younger nuns have deserted in favour of more socially useful activities. In a small room in Piazza Venezia it is still possible to order cannoli, virgins’ cakes, and triumphs of gluttony through a grate and watch them come round on the wheel. It was there that I ordered the “bunch of grapes” that I described in my book On Persephone’s Island, a magnificent baroque monument in almond and pistachio paste, lovingly fashioned in the shape of a cluster of pale-green grapes, glistening with a silver bloom, curling with leaves and tendrils, and hiding a filling of zuccata preserves flavoured with cinnamon. It was so beautiful that we could hardly bear to eat it, and so delicious we could hardly bear to stop.
Just as I started to write this chapter a friend of mine went to order a bunch of grapes to take with her to the north as a hostess present, but the lay worker behind the grate told her that the nun who had made them had died suddenly, at the age of sixty-one. There is no one else in the convent who knows her secrets, so the bunch of grapes is gone forever. Another chapter in Sicilian culinary history has come to a close.