For Christmas’ Sake, Don’t Call It Fruitcake
Two fingers fat and sooty with cocoa powder, panforte is anything but lighthearted, the name even proclaiming, in Puccinian baritone, its gastronomic brawn. First concocted by kitchen wenches in thirteenth century Siena, this strong bread was tucked into the pockets of marauding Crusaders fortifying a wrath undertaken, yet again,
in the name of god. Once deemed so valuable, its dense slices were used as catholic wampum for payment of February taxes to the insatiable nuns of Montecelso, selling entry into heaven for a sweet tithe.
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While medieval Sienese painters created Byzantine art, the city’s spice sellers (the original pharmacists),
produced piles of panforte with precisely seventeen ingredients, corresponding to the number of districts
within the city walls of Siena, each named for an animal or symbol, but none for bread. Nicknamed il Panpepato, or pepper bread, from the sneeze-inducing quantities of black and cayenne peppers mixed into the dough. The spicy baked blocks were touted as a curative with healing powers, gobbled by aristocrats and clergy and well-to-do on high holy days and under-the-weather days.
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Hours, weeks, months spent gathering ingredients, scouring far-flung towns and specialty food markets
with a stained, scribbled recipe subtly refined each December. The cakes glint and glimmer with jewels
from my pantry: hazelnuts from Piedmont, white-as-sand Sicilian almonds, baked figs from Calabria, exotic citrus peels (Meyer lemon, yuzu, blood orange), laboriously candied by a Berkeley artist
with an English accent, and chopped persimmons from the backyard made holey by nature. Spice its hallmark, nutmeg and cloves are grated, Tellicherry peppercorns and coarse salt ground, and cayenne peppers, filched off drying stalks hanging from kitchen cupboards, are pestled to rough powder, like dregs from an expensive binge. With just enough flour to bind the baubles, the batter is smothered
in a Hades-hot, sweet sludge; a melting pot of Vermont butter, cane sugar and cups and of cups of honey the hue of horse chestnuts harvested from our humming hive, the bees trading me for one thick, chewy slice of panforte.
