Cassatella

A cassatella (cassatedda in the Trapani dialect) is essentially a sweet fried raviolo. A disc of thin pastry made with white wine or Marsala and lard is folded around a spoonful of sheep's ricotta sweetened with sugar and studded with dark chocolate chips, sealed with a fluted cutter, deep-fried and covered in icing sugar the moment it comes out of the oil.

The wine in the dough is functional, not decorative. Alcohol flashes off fast in hot oil, which is what makes the pastry puff and blister into an uneven, crisp surface a water-based dough will not give you. Together with the lard it keeps the pastry light despite the frying.

The name is a diminutive of cassata, which is where nearly all the confusion starts. Cassata siciliana is a chilled layered cake (sponge, ricotta, green marzipan, sugar glaze, candied fruit) assembled over hours and served in slices. A cassatella is a single-portion fried pastry eaten standing up, minutes after it was made. Sweetened sheep's ricotta is the only thing they share.

And there is a second Sicilian sweet with the same name, worth knowing before you order: in Catania, the cassatelle di Sant'Agata, also called minne, are small domed cakes filled with ricotta cream, coated in white icing and topped with a candied cherry, tied to the patron saint's feast on 3–5 February. Same word, different province, different pastry.

Warm ricotta first (mild, faintly grassy, sweetened but not heavily) then the snap of the pastry and small bursts of bitter chocolate. Sheep's ricotta is the flavour that carries it, and it tastes noticeably more savoury and more lactic than the cow's-milk kind most people know.

The contrast is temperature as much as texture: hot, blistered, crunchy shell against a filling that is soft and just above body temperature. Lemon zest and a pinch of cinnamon in the dough sit in the background and stop the whole thing reading as plain fried sweetness.

The sugar level is lower than you would expect from something buried in icing sugar. Trapanese pastry cooks sweeten the ricotta at roughly 200–250 g of sugar per kilo, which is about half what goes into a cannolo filling: the dusting on the outside does the rest.

Deep-fry in plenty of oil held at 170°C, a minute and a half to two minutes a side, turning once. Shallow oil means one scorched face and one pale one; oil that is too hot colours the pastry before the filling has warmed through.

Do not overfill. A generous spoonful, a clear centimetre of border, all the air pressed out, then seal with a fluted cutter. An overfilled cassatella splits in the pan, and once ricotta hits the oil the whole batch of oil is finished.

Dust with icing sugar immediately, while the surface is still hot and slightly damp: cold pastry will not hold it. Serve within minutes. This is street pastry, fried to order in Trapani bars, and twenty minutes on a plate already costs it something.

Baking is possible and some shops do it for volume, but the wine pastry will not puff: you get a dry biscuit shell instead of a blistered one. Leftover sweetened ricotta is already cannoli filling and keeps two days in the fridge.

Fried, they do not keep. The working window is under an hour, and within twenty minutes the pastry is already drawing moisture out of the filling and losing its snap from the inside outwards. Four minutes in a 180 C oven brings some of the crispness back by driving that water off again; a microwave does the opposite and leaves them rubbery. Unfried, they hold about twenty-four hours in the fridge, laid out separately on a floured tray, never stacked, because the sealed edges stick to one another and tear when you lift them.

Raw is also how they freeze, and they freeze well for up to two months: spaced on a tray until firm, then bagged. Fry them straight from frozen with the oil dropped to 165 C and about a minute more per side, since thawing first is what makes the edges open in the pan. The sweetened ricotta filling on its own keeps two days in an airtight box in the fridge and separates a little, releasing whey at the bottom, so it wants stirring before use.

The pastry should be thin and covered in blisters, golden in an uneven, patchy way. A smooth, pale, thick shell means dough made without wine, rolled badly or fried at the wrong temperature. The filling has to be sheep ricotta, and you can smell it: a faintly wild lactic note that cow ricotta simply does not have. If it reads as sweet and nothing else, it is cow milk or an industrial pastry cream. The ricotta should also stay where it is; a filling that spreads across the plate, or that has already soaked the pastry from inside, was not drained.

Icing sugar goes on while the pastry is hot, generously but loosely. A wet sugar crust means it was dusted late or has been standing in the case. The simplest test of all is temperature, because this is a hot pastry: in the fry shops around Trapani they are made to order and handed over in paper. Do not confuse the name with cassata, the iced ricotta cake, which is another dessert entirely, and abroad any fried ricotta turnover tends to be called a cannoli variant.

In Sicily, from pastry shops and bars across the province of Trapani, fried to order in the mornings and especially in the run-up to Easter. Sicilian producers also sell them raw and frozen throughout Italy at 10 to 14 euro a kilo: a sensible option, because frying them yourself removes the one real weakness of the industrial product, which is the time between the fryer and the plate.

Outside Italy they are genuinely rare. Italian-American and Italian-British bakeries make them around Easter, at roughly 14 to 22 dollars a pound or 18 to 28 pounds a kilo. Otherwise they are a home project, and an easy one.

The ingredient to source carefully is the ricotta. Sheep's-milk ricotta is sold by Italian delis and some cheesemongers; if you can only get the cow's-milk kind, buy whole-milk ricotta rather than the smooth tub sort, and drain it for a full day.

Trapani and the towns inland from it, and above all Erice, the medieval hill town reached by cable car from Trapani, where the almond-pastry tradition came out of the enclosed convent of San Carlo and is still practised in several shops in the same few streets.

The Belice valley is where the pastry comes from: Salemi, Santa Ninfa, Castelvetrano. At Gibellina, destroyed by the 1968 earthquake, Alberto Burri's Cretto covers the streets of the old town in white concrete, one of the largest land-art works in the world, and half an hour from the best bakeries.

The Greek temples of Segesta and Selinunte, the salt pans between Trapani and Marsala with the island of Mozia, and the Cous Cous Fest at San Vito lo Capo in September are all within an hour.

Go at Easter, when production peaks. And if you are in Catania between 3 and 5 February, every window in the city fills with the other cassatelle (those of Sant'Agata) for the patron saint's feast.