It is currently darkest winter and Christmas is just around the corner. To encourage some warmth, we have an extended extract from Gillian Riley's Oxford Companion to Italian Food on Italian festive food. Just don't get too hungry...
The Christmas season begins 6 December, the birthday of San Nicola, the original Saint Nicholas, and 8 December, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and it ends on 6 January, Epiphany. The real season of gift giving begins on 13 December in the Veneto and Lombardy when Santa Lucia brings presents to children, along with tiny sweets and cookies shaped like piglets, ponies, or flowers. The saint is honoured in Sicily for bringing grain to the island's famine-stricken people, the legend says in the year 1600, who were so hungry that they didn't waste time grinding grain into flour but ate the berries straightaway. As a result, everyone in Palermo observes the day by eating cuccía, a sweet pudding of cooked wheat berries, ricotta, and candied orange peel.
Christmas falls on 25 December, near the winter solstice, the shortest and darkest day of the year. In the pre-Christian era, the date was the birthday of Mithra, the popular pagan sun god, until the Church, responding to the competition, moved the Nativity to that day, thereby celebrating the birth of the sun and the son concurrently. Many breads made in this season of scarcity take their round shape from the sun and are meant to encourage the incremental rebirth of its warmth and to propitiate the powers governing life and death.
Christmas is a two-day feast of massive quantities and opulent dishes. Most dishes are strictly tied to local tradition, but a few have become national symbols. Panettone, a high-domed, buttery bread studded with candied fruit and raisins, was originally from Milan, but is now found everywhere. Capitone, eel, is the traditional fish of Christmas Eve in the south, while capon is traditional on Christmas tables in the north, where stuffed pasta arrives in capon broth. Chewy almond and honey torrone originated in Benevento but now is everyone's Christmas sweet.
The Christmas day meal often begins with stuffed pastas floating in broth. The shape and stuffing may change—in Bologna, navel-shaped tortellini are meat-filled, and their element is capon broth, while in Mantua the sorbir look like half moons and the broth is spiked with Lambrusco. Ferrara's cappellacci look like little hats and are stuffed with pumpkin, while Emilia's cappelletti have the same shape but are filled with finely minced capon, eggs, ricotta, raveggiolo, and parmesan cheeses, grated lemon rind, and nutmeg.
The panoply of Italian Christmas desserts is stunning. Spongata, a honeyed nut and raisin cake that is wrapped in two discs of pastry, like panforte, has been the Christmas specialty of Parma and Reggio Emilia for centuries, while in Siena spice and walnut filled cavallucci, medium-hard white cookies imprinted with the image of a horse, are eaten in alternating bites with panforte. Romans serve cassola, a delicate cheesecake originally from the Jewish community, while in Campania, honours go to struffoli, pyramids of fried dough with a spicy honeyed glaze, rococo, sweet dough wreaths, Sicilian cassata, and susamielle, made with sesame seeds and honey. In Apulia, cartellate, curly ribbons of dough, symbolize the Baby Jesus's sheets, calzoncielli his pillow, and dita degli apostoli, tiny omelettes filled with chocolate- or espresso flavoured ricotta, the fingers of the Apostles. Sicilians feast on buccellato, fig- and nut-filled Christmas ring-shaped pastries; Romans can't do without mostaccioli, cigar-shaped spiced nut pastries; and Calabrians eat zeppole, fritters which are called zippulas in Sardinia.
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