The convent sweets of Sicily
The nuns in Sicilian convents and monasteries for centuries prepared exquisite sweets, in a tradition that lasted at least until the 1970s. Each convent or monastery was known for a particular sweet. In my native Palermo, the Benedictine nuns of the Martorana convent were renowned for their beautiful and realistic marzipan fruit, their cannoli, and their teste di Turco (Turks’ heads). The cassatelle of the Badia Nuova (New Abbey) were famous, as were the minne di vergine, or virgins’ breasts with their cherry nipples, made by the nuns of the Montevergine convent, and the trionfo di gola made by those at the Santo Spirito. Trionfo di gola means ‘triumph of gluttony’, and is an apt name for this rich and elaborate piece of confectionery. Many of these sweets made by chaste nuns have profane names, in keeping with the contradictory spirit of baroque Sicily.
The patisserie tradition of the Sicilian convents dates back a few centuries, though by a strange and ironic twist, it owes the origins of its key ingredients to the Arabic period and the reign of Islam in Sicily. The most prominent of these ingredients, an essential part of most Sicilian confectionery, is marzipan, which is known as ‘royal dough’ or pasta reale (Taste note: the Maltese word pastarjali is a corruption of this). Many religious orders lived on charity, and selling confectionery was a way of earning some extra money. Even today, in Mazara del Vallo in the province of Trapani, people buy almond biscuits called vuccunetti at the cloistered convent in the town centre. The exchange of money and biscuits is made using a system like the ‘wheel’ in the convent wall, by which abandoned babies were handed over to the nuns in days gone by. The wheel rotates in the wall, between the street and the interior of the convent. The money goes in and the vuccunetti come out. In Erice, also in the province of Trapani, the cloistered nuns devised the famous ericini, which are highly coloured almond biscuits, and also the liqueur known as ericino.
Effectively, orders of cloistered nuns became confectioners to the aristocracy and to sovereigns. With plenty of time on their hands, they achieved a level of perfection that was not possible for busy cooks in households and palaces.
They also kept their recipes secret, handing them down from one ‘chosen’ nun to another, until several of these recipes died with the last nun to know them. The nuns were especially busy making sweets to celebrate the feasts of the liturgical calendar. ‘Virgins’ breasts’, for example, were made originally to celebrate the feast of St Agatha.
Dolci delle monache (nuns’ sweets) and dolci della badia (abbey sweets) were part and parcel of daily Sicilian life until at least 30 years ago. Their rapid disappearance is a direct consequence of the decline in vocations. With fewer women becoming nuns, and fewer still becoming cloistered nuns, the recipes and methods are vanishing fast. Some months ago, a group of academics who study Sicilian food culture met at a Slow Food conference in Erice to discuss this very subject. Even the last traces of convent sweets, they noted, are soon to be gone for good. The American food writer Mary Taylor Simeti, who has lived near Palermo since the 1960s, and who has written widely about Sicilian food, tells in her book Bitter Almonds the story of Maria Grammatica. Maria was brought up by the Franciscan nuns in Erice in the 1950s. She was taught their recipes and the secrets of their recipes, and preserves them still to this day.
Very few convents and monasteries survived the church-state property discord in the 19th century in Sicily, and there was a further reduction in their numbers after the agreement between Benito Mussolini and the Vatican in 1929. These developments dealt a near-fatal blow to the tradition of ‘religious confectionery’. Many nuns preferred to take their secrets with them to the grave rather than pass them from sacred to profane hands, and so the recipes were not transferred from the cloistered world of the convents to secular cooks. Today, for instance, in the splendid church of Santa Caterina in Palermo, only five nuns remain and the youngest one is 79 years old.
Sweet-making traditions survive in the Convent of Palma di Montechiaro, for instance, and at the Santo Spirito Convent in Agrigento ...... but that world of whispers, of veils and grilles, of shadows and ancient wooden doors, from which Sicilian ladies bought their edible delights without ever seeing the face of the woman who had made them, is set to disappear forever.
St Agatha and minne di vergine
The possibly mythical figure of Agatha is supposed to have been born in Catania or Palermo - both cities claim her as their own. The story goes that she was killed in around AD250, by burning, after having had her breasts cut off. It is one of the earliest stories of sexual harassment: after an edict was issued by Rome against Christians, a local ruler tried to blackmail her into having sex with him in exchange for not persecuting her. She refused, and the rest is history, or should we say myth… and minne di vergine, which were baked traditionally by convents to mark her day on 5 February. Prayers to St Agatha are supposed to have helped avert the Turkish invasion of Malta in the mid-16th century. She is now the patron saint of, you’ve guessed it: breast cancer patients.