By Burt Wolf
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Italy is famous for its sweet confections and pastries, and there are historical reasons for this notoriety. For thousands of years, honey was the primary sweetening in the human diet. And during those years, it became a symbol for goodness and purity. For centuries, honey lived its sweet life without competition. And then, in the eleventh century, things began to change. Sugar arrived from the East, and Western food has never been the same.
We know that for at least 2,000 years sugar has been in use on both the near and Far East. We know that the Arabs brought sugar to Sicily and Spain during the 700's. We also know that no one in Europe paid much attention to sugar until the time of the Crusades. The Crusaders got a really good luck at the stuff in Tripoli and very soon thereafter it was being imported to Europe by the traders in Venice. But for over four hundred years, it was rare, it was expensive, it was used only as a spice or a medicine, and only by the very rich.
Nevertheless, from the very beginning of its use in Europe, we can document an increase in the number of recipes using sugar. Our sweet tooth had begun to grow, and when sugar production got started in the Caribbean, the sugar business took off. Suddenly there was a clear increase in the use of sugar in place of honey. As sugar became more and more available, and at a lower and lower price, the general public began to use it as much as possible.
Sugar made average people feel that they were eating like a king. And sugar became an important item of international trade, which was never the case with honey. Sugar was big business, and it was a sweet deal for the governments that taxed it. Sugar became the first luxury to end up as a mainstay in the diet of an entire continent.
But even in the early years when sugar was coming into Europe as a rare and expensive spice, the Italians were developing pastry and candy recipes that used sugar as the sweetening agent. The Italians also began to develop an international reputation for their skill with sugar. They were so well though of in this area, the up until the last century it was the custom for wealthy household to employ Italian pastry cooks and confectioners along with their French chefs.
Panettone
Many of the early European specialists in pastry and confectionery were from northern Italy. Northern Italians had learned about sugar from the Arabs who were living in Sicily and from the Crusaders who brought it backto Europe in the 1100's. Northern Italians also had easy access to the spices that were coming in through Venice. One of the earliest recorded examples of their skills deals with a recipe for a cake called "panettone." There are lots of stories about how Panettone got started, but the most popular is set in Milan during the year 1490.
Once upon a time, there was a young nobleman who fell in love with the daughter of a baker named Toni. To impress the girl's father, the young man disguised himself as a baker's assistant and went to work in Toni's bake shop. While he was there, he invented a sweet, delicate, dome-shaped yeast bread made of flour, eggs, milk, butter, raisins, and candied fruit. The cake became wildly popular and people came to the bakery from far and wide to buy what was called Pande Toni, which translates into English as "Toni's bread." The young man became a hero to the father, the marriage of the young nobleman and Toni's daughter was a glorious event, and everyone lived happily ever after-with the possible exception of the nobleman's lawyers, who never realized that Panettone would become popular throughout the world and therefore failed to trademark the name or the recipe.
Pandoro
Pandoro, which means the "bread of gold," originated in the city of Verona, the home of Romeo and Juilet. Some historians believe that in the 1400's, when the Venetian Republic was using recipes to display their wealth and power, Pandoro got started as a cake that was covered in gold leaf. During the 1700's , when Venice was not doing as well, Pandoro evolved into a Christmas cake in the shape of a tree with a powdered sugar star on top. It's a rich cake made with eggs, butter, and sugar. Today, it's no longer confined to the Christmas season and often comes to the table as a dessert stuffed with ice cream, topped with fruit, or drizzled with a rum sauce.
Panforte
The story of panforte begins in a nunnery in Siena. In order to take a census of the local population, the head of the nunnery asked everybody in the neighborhood to bring in a cake made from spices and honey. The nuns like the result, made it an annual event, and eventually the recipe became standardized into what we now call "panforte." The most popular version is called "Margherita" and was first produced in 1879 to mark a state visit of Queen Margherita of Savoy to the town of Siena. I'll bet you didn't know any of that. And I hope it improves your appreciation of panforte.
Torrone
Just about everything on the Italian menu comes with a story. One of the most unusual is the tale of torrone. On October 24, 1441, Bianca Maria Visconti married Francesco Sforza. These two came from the most important families in Milan and the wedding was a major social event. The bride's dowry contained an extraordinary collection of things-including the city of Cremona just outside of Milan. I love that. "Marry my daughter and I will give you this nice little city as a wedding gift." The mind boggles. So Sforza gets Cremona, and the bakers of the city commemorate the event by making a candy in the shape of the tower. Actually, the tower's considerably bigger than this, this is just a scale model. It's made from almonds and honey and whipped egg whites that have been baked for hours.
Big hit at the wedding. And the guests who had come from all over Europe began asking for samples of the torrone to take back home. These days, the tower is somewhat modified in form. Looks more like the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City, but the confection is more popular than ever.
The Colomba
The Colomba is a yeast cake made with butter, egg yolks, milk, sugar, orange peel, and almonds. It has a soft and delicate texture, a golden crust, it always comes in the shape of a dove, and has been associated with Easter for many centuries. It is a traditional dessert at Easter time.
The Colomba is said to have originated as a result of the battle of Legnano, which took place just after Easter in 1176. Things were not going well for the MIlanese as they defended their city against an attack by Barbarossa... until three doves flew out of a nearby church. The birds appear to have flown an air support mission that dropped bad luck on Barbarossa and delivered victory to the Milanese. The cake reminds Milan of this triumph.
Baci
Baci is the Italian word for "kisses," and it has been applied to this candy since 1907. Young Giovanni Buitoni had been sent by his family to set up a candy factory in Perugia. Luisa Spagnoli was the product developer. They fell in love but were forced to keep their relationship a secret. They exchanged their messages of love by wrapping notes in chocolate samples that they sent up and back between them. Today, Baci contains a message of love in every package to commermorate that relationship.
Italian Biscotti
The baking of biscotti in Italy became important during the 1600's when the Venetian navy began searching for foods that would not go bad at sea. They realized that dried cookies would be perfect, and set up a Biscotti Procurement Office. I would have like to have worked there. During the 1800's, the manufacturers widened their audience, in more ways than one, by marketing their biscotti to the upper classes. They designed all of their packaging to attract the rich and famous. Biscotti, by the wasy, is not the Italian word for "biscuit"; it means "twice baked."
Milan
Milan has been an importnat city for well over 2,000 years. It was a significant political and commercial center for the Roman Empire, and it has maintained that position ever since. The name Milan comes from an ancient word meaning "the center of the plain." It's a reference to the fact that Milan was built in the middle of the Po Valley plain, a crossing point for a number of roads that came down out of the Alps and connected to the commercial trade routes in what is now Italy.
Milan's Hotel Principe di Savoia
Milan's Hotel Principe di Savoia opened in 1927 and was designed as a new type of hotel. There had been luxury hotels for tourists, and there had been effecient hotels for business travelers, but the Principe was the first hotel designed to meet the needs of the traveling business executive in surroundings that were luxurious.
Today, the Principe di Savoia is part of ITT Sheraton's Luxury Collection, and the original objectives are still being pursued. The main bar looks like the winter gardens that were popular at the turn of the century - a courtyard enclosed by a dome of glass. The Cafe Doney serves pastries and an afternoon tea the way it did decades ago.
Bring the taste of Hotel Principe di Savoia to your table. Executive Chef Romano Resen was generous enough to share the recipe for two of his most popular dishes, Tiramisu and Zabaglione, with Burt Wolf.
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