Pasticciotto

Break open the glossy oval crust, and a generous amount of custard appears inside. The pasticciotto of the Salento region is a small pastry made by cooking the cream first, enclosing it between a bottom crust and a lid, and then baking it once more. In pastry shops and bars in southern Italy it is also served at breakfast, and when eaten while still warm, it offers both the toasty aroma of the crust and the softness of the filling. While a story from Galatina says it was made from leftover dough, the name itself also appears in even older culinary records.

Chilling and rolling out a dough that contains fat

The outer crust is pasta frolla, made with flour, sugar, fat and eggs. Some traditional Salento recipes (the proportions of ingredients and the method of preparation) use strutto, which is rendered pork fat. There are also recipes that use butter or margarine, and the choice of fat changes the aroma and the way the crust crumbles tenderly.

The dough is quickly brought together, chilled, and rolled out to a thickness that lets it fit snugly against the mold. In one small butter-based recipe, for example, this is about 5 millimeters. From this dough, a crust covering the bottom and sides of the mold and a lid that encloses the filling are prepared.

The filling is cooked first and cooled before it goes in

The custard filling is made by heating milk, egg yolks, sugar, and flour or starch. It is flavored with vanilla or lemon, thickened in a pan, and then cooled. It is brought to a consistency that stays soft without being too runny, and is then filled into the dough and baked once more.

The cream is filled into a mold lined with crust, and sour cherries cooked in syrup are sometimes added. It is covered with another layer of crust, the edges are pressed closed with the fingers, the excess dough is removed, and the center is shaped into a plump dome. In the butter-dough method introduced earlier, an egg wash of egg yolk combined with milk or fresh cream gives it a glossy finish. To keep the cream from flowing out during baking, the mold is not overfilled, and the edges of the top and bottom crusts are sealed firmly.

The large torta and pasticciotti with different fillings

The torta pasticciotto encloses cream between top and bottom crusts in the same way as the small pasticciotto, but is baked in a large round mold. Custard and sour cherries are placed in a strutto frolla and covered with a lid; after baking, it is cooled in the mold before being cut into portions. There is also a small version in which drained ricotta is combined with cold custard and lemon juice is added, so even with the same way of enclosing the filling, its flavor changes.

The related fruttone and pastries of the same name elsewhere

Fruttone, a related pastry from Salento, fills a very similar frolla shell with almond paste and a jam such as pear, quince or apricot, and covers the top with dark chocolate. Both its filling and its finish differ from those of the pasticciotto, which centers on an egg cream.

Other regions of Italy also have pastries with the same name. In Atrani in Campania, there is one filled with lemon-scented cream and sour cherries and finished with powdered sugar. The pasticciotti di carne of Patti in Sicily are round pastries made with veal and toasted almonds. Even pastries that share a name use different fillings from region to region.

The creation legend of Galatina and the family records

According to a legend in the Puglia traditional food records, in 1745, during the feast of Saint Paul in Galatina, Nicola Ascalone put dough and cream that were not enough for a single tart into small copper vessels. The story goes that what he himself called a “pasticcio,” a word suggesting a jumble or a mixture, became a single-serving pastry. Another version gives the craftsman’s name as Andrea, and it remains unclear who began making it and when.

Among the records of this family’s history is one showing that Vincenzo Scalone, from Galatone, married in Galatina in 1787. In an 1816 death record he is listed as a seller of distilled spirits, and the work of later generations of the family led to coffee shops and pastry shops. Separately from the single invention story of 1745, there are records showing how the occupations of the family that ran the shop changed over time.

While examining genealogical and occupational records, Alessandro Massaro argues that the story of the Ascalone family’s creation spread through works such as a 2003 Galatina cookbook compiled by Loredana Viola and a 2005 article by Zeffirino Rizzelli. The origin story attached to this pastry spread through print in later times and became tied to the names of shops and the town.

From old pastry names and records of copper molds to a Salento specialty

The name pasticciotto was used for various pastries even before the version made in Salento today became established. In a letter of April 30, 1538, from Annibal Caro to Silvestro da Prato, it appears as a pastry to be fed to someone in order to placate them. Its ingredients and shape are not described.

A 1707 household inventory from Nardò lists 8 copper molds for making the pastry of that name. While the name of the molds survives, neither the filling of the pastries made in them nor whether they had a raised oval shape has been passed down. Cookbooks from the 16th to the 19th century contain a wide variety of recipes in which sweet or savory fillings are placed in small vessels or in dough. Bartolomeo Scappi’s milk pasticcio places a cooked cream of milk, flour and eggs in a pastry shell, and a top lid also appears in Ippolito Cavalcanti’s 1839 recipe. The combination of cream with top and bottom crusts can also be traced through records such as these.

According to the traditional food records, the custard-filled pastry loved in Salento today is thought to have become established around the end of the 19th century, and it is said to have spread widely as an artisan pastry in the second half of the 20th century. Shops in Lecce and Galatina each make their own variations in proportions, degree of browning and rise, and in 2004 it was listed among the traditional foods (PAT) of the Province of Lecce.

Glossary