Confetti di Sulmona

A confetto from Sulmona is a whole almond built up under dozens of paper-thin layers of sugar. Two ingredients: almonds and sugar, with water only to dissolve the second.

What defines the Sulmona school is what is left out. Industrial panning uses starch, flour or gelatine to bulk out the shell and cut the working time, which gives you a thick, round, surprisingly light sweet with a small or broken kernel inside. In Sulmona the coating is sugar alone, so it stays thin and clings to the nut.

The consequence is visible without tasting anything, and it is the fastest way to identify the real thing. A Sulmona confetto is oval and tapered, with two faint points: it has the shape of the almond inside it, because the sugar layer is too thin to disguise it. A perfectly spherical sugared almond has either a bulked-out shell or a kernel much smaller than it appears.

The reference almond is the Pizzuta d'Avola from Sicily: pointed, hard-shelled, chosen because it is dense, low in oil and does not go rancid under sugar. In the best confetti the almond is around 60% of the finished weight; in industrial versions it falls below 40%.

Much less sweet than it looks. The sugar shell is thin enough that it cracks and dissolves in a couple of seconds, and what fills the mouth afterwards is almond: dense, faintly bitter, toasted. The balance is the point: an industrial sugared almond is a mouthful of sugar with a nut somewhere in the middle, while a Sulmona confetto is a nut with a coating.

The texture goes in two stages. A clean, brittle snap, then the firm resistance of a whole almond that takes several bites to finish. If the shell crumbles rather than cracks, or if you reach two almond halves instead of one nut, the panning was rushed.

The plain white ones are the benchmark. Flavoured and chocolate-centred versions exist and are made well in Sulmona, but the white almond confetto is what the city is judged on.

These are given more than they are cooked. The rule that matters is the number: five per wedding favour, an odd and indivisible count, one for each of the five wishes (health, wealth, happiness, fertility and long life). Three is used for some christenings, seven and nine for the most formal occasions.

The colours are a code and Sulmona takes it seriously. White for weddings, red for graduation, blue and pink for births, green for engagements, silver for a twenty-fifth anniversary and gold for a fiftieth. Giving the wrong colour for the occasion is a mistake people in Abruzzo notice.

The confetti flowers are the other half of the tradition: daisies, roses, wheat ears and whole bouquets built by binding confetti one by one with covered wire and tulle. You can buy them ready-made or commission them, and in the shops along Corso Ovidio you can watch them assembled by hand.

At the table the honest uses are few. Roughly crushed over a semifreddo or fiordilatte gelato they add crunch and almond, and they are served with coffee at the end of a meal, which is how they get eaten in Sulmona when no ceremony is involved.

Humidity is the enemy here, not time. Sugar is hygroscopic: in a damp room the surface dulls, turns tacky and the confetti start sticking to one another. They belong in a closed container in a cupboard, away from heat and out of direct light. The fridge is the one place to avoid, because the condensation that forms when a cold confetto meets room air is exactly what marks the coating, and freezing does the same thing for the same reason.

Sealed and kept dry they hold twelve to eighteen months, and the limit is set by the almond rather than by the sugar: it loses its crunch and can take on a paint-like note as the oil in it oxidises. Chocolate-coated confetti run shorter at six to eight months, and above roughly 25 °C the cocoa butter migrates to the surface and shows as a pale film. Bomboniere already tied in tulle keep the same way, but the fabric lets damp through, so favours waiting months for a ceremony do better inside a closed box.

Shape is the first test and the most reliable. A confetto di Sulmona is oval and tapered with only the faintest points, so you can see a whole almond sitting inside. Perfectly spherical means the shell was bulked out with starch or flour. Weight is the second: at the same size a real one is heavier, because the almond is denser than its coating, and a handful that feels light is a handful of sugar. The third is the bite, where the sugar should break thin and clean onto a whole almond rather than two halves put back together.

Read the ingredients: almonds and sugar. Starch, flour, gelatine, gum arabic in quantity and added flavourings all point to a fast process, and in the chocolate versions the only legitimate addition is chocolate. Wedding white here is ivory, not optical white, so a brilliant even white with a plastic shine is a finish the Sulmona houses do not use. In English these are sold generically as Jordan almonds, which is a category rather than this.

Buy them in Sulmona if you can: the confectioners along Corso Ovidio sell loose by weight at 18 to 30 euro a kilo, and the difference between grades is real and worth asking about. Industrial sugared almonds sit at 8 to 14 euro a kilo.

Outside Italy they are a specialist purchase. Italian grocers and online importers in the US carry them at roughly 14 to 25 dollars a pound; in the UK expect 25 to 40 pounds a kilo from Italian delicatessens. Anything cheaper is a different product wearing the same name.

Check three things before paying. The shape should be oval and tapered rather than round. The ingredient list should read almonds and sugar, with starch, flour and gelatine absent. And the weight in the hand should surprise you: a real confetto is denser than it looks, because the almond is most of it.

Confetti flowers are priced per piece rather than by weight: 2 to 5 euro for a single daisy, 20 to 60 for an assembled bouquet, and considerably more for bespoke ceremony pieces. You are paying for assembly time, not sugar.

Sulmona sits in the Valle Peligna, in a bowl of flat land ringed by the mountains of the Majella national park, and it is small enough to cover on foot in half a day. Corso Ovidio runs the length of it, lined with confectioners' windows full of confetti flowers; Piazza Garibaldi holds a medieval arcaded aqueduct and the town market.

The stop that explains the product is the confectionery museum at the Pelino works, in business since 1783, where the copper panning basins, the nineteenth-century machinery and the archives of an unbroken trade are on display.

Two dates are worth planning around. On Easter Sunday, Piazza Garibaldi hosts the Madonna che scappa, in which the statue of the Virgin is run across the square in a procession that lasts a few seconds and is anticipated all year. On the last Sunday of July the Giostra Cavalleresca fills the same square with a historical joust between the town's quarters.

Beyond the town are the hermitages of Celestine V cut into the rock of the Majella, and the hill villages of Pacentro and Introdacqua a few kilometres away.