Mostaccioli

Neapolitan mostaccioli, mustacciuoli in dialect, are rhombuses of spiced dough about two centimetres thick, baked briefly and then coated in tempered dark chocolate. The shell is glossy and snaps; the inside stays soft and faintly damp, carrying a spice load that arrives immediately and lingers.

The dough is flour, sugar or honey, cocoa, ground almonds, candied peel and a spice blend Naples calls pisto: cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, star anise, coriander. It is sold loose in the spice shops of the old town through December and it is the signature of the whole Neapolitan Christmas repertoire.

The leavening is neither yeast nor ordinary baking powder but ammonium bicarbonate, baker's ammonia, which gases off completely in the oven and leaves a porous crumb that stays soft for weeks. It is why a mostacciolo bought in early December is still good in mid-January.

One warning for American readers: mostaccioli is also the name of a smooth tubular pasta widely sold in the US Midwest, where baked mostaccioli is a standard church-hall dish. The two share only a name and a diamond-cut logic. This page is about the Neapolitan sweet.

The word also travels within Italy. In Soriano Calabro, in Calabria, mostaccioli are rock-hard honey-and-flour figures shaped into horses, fish and hearts; in Umbria and Abruzzo they are dry spiced biscuits. The soft chocolate-covered rhombus is the Campanian version and the one the Italian market means by default.

Spice first, and more of it than any northern European Christmas biscuit delivers. Cloves and star anise lead, cinnamon fills in behind them, and the nutmeg shows up at the end. It is warm rather than hot, and it does not taste of ginger at all, which is the main surprise for anyone approaching from gingerbread.

Underneath the spice there is cocoa in the dough as well as on the outside, plus toasted almond and small bursts of candied citrus. The sweetness is moderate and the dark chocolate coating pulls it down further, adding a clean bitterness that keeps the whole thing from turning into confectionery.

Texture is the other half. The chocolate shell breaks with a dry snap, then the crumb underneath is soft, dense and slightly moist: closer to a chewy brownie edge than to a biscuit. There is no crunch inside unless the almonds have been left coarse.

One mostacciolo weighs sixty to a hundred grams and is a full portion. Two is a lot.

Eat them at room temperature, one per person, after a meal or with afternoon coffee. They are dense and heavily spiced, and a single one is a genuine portion.

Never serve them cold. Refrigeration hardens the crumb and dulls the chocolate, and the condensation that forms as they warm up leaves white streaks across the shell that never go away.

Do not try to cut them with a knife: the coating cracks and the crumb crumbles. Break them by hand along the diagonal if you need to share.

Crumbled, they are excellent: over ricotta semifreddo or fiordilatte gelato, where they add spice, almond and chocolate in one move, or in place of a third of the savoiardi in a Christmas tiramisu.

The traditional Neapolitan way to finish the leftovers is to break one into a bowl of hot milk on the morning of 26 December.

Three or four weeks at room temperature in a tin or a closed box is the working span, which is long for a baked sweet. The reason is the raising agent: ammonium bicarbonate leaves an open, porous crumb that holds on to its own moisture instead of drying out. The refrigerator is the place to avoid. Cold stiffens the crumb and pulls cocoa butter to the surface of the chocolate as pale streaks and patches, a change in appearance that does not reverse once it has happened.

Humidity acts on these the opposite way round from most Christmas baking: it does not soften them, it makes the coating tacky and takes the shine off the chocolate, which is the argument for a genuinely airtight container. Above about 25 degrees the shell softens and the diamonds glue themselves to each other, so in warm weather they go into the box with baking paper between the layers. They freeze well, and best before the coating goes on: bare baked biscuits hold three months and are dipped after thawing. Boxed ones follow the date and the baker.

In American shops the word is a trap: mostaccioli there is usually a tube pasta close to penne, and the biscuit sits in Italian bakeries around Christmas under mustacciuoli or mostaccioli napoletani. The real thing is a diamond with sharp edges and an even height; rounded or domed shapes come from a wet dough or a hot oven. The chocolate coating should be thin, glossy and true dark chocolate, snapping dry when you break it. A thick, dull shell that gives under a fingertip at room temperature is normally a compound glaze made without cocoa butter, and it leaves a waxy film in the mouth.

Inside, the crumb should be soft and moist rather than dry or powdery, with small cubes of candied peel visible at the break; a uniform paste with nothing in it is a simplified industrial version. The spice blend, the Neapolitan pisto, should arrive as one thing, with no single spice standing above the others, so a dominant cinnamon or anise means it was unbalanced. Calabrian mostaccioli are a different biscuit entirely: honey-based, shaped into figures, no chocolate.

In Naples, from any pastry shop in the old town between 8 December and Epiphany, at 18 to 30 euro a kilo. They are sold by weight, usually mixed on a tray with roccocò, susamielli and raffiuoli. A single piece is 2 to 3.50 euro. Artisan versions with real couverture chocolate and a high almond percentage reach 32 to 38 euro a kilo.

Read the coating before you pay. Real dark chocolate is thin, glossy and snaps; a thick matte layer that goes soft under your fingers is a cocoa-butter substitute, and it leaves a greasy film in the mouth.

Abroad, Italian delis stock them in December at roughly 14 to 24 dollars a pound in the US and 25 to 40 pounds a kilo in the UK. Online Neapolitan pasticcerie ship them, and they travel well because they are built to keep.

The most useful thing to order from Naples is the pisto itself: a few euro a packet from the spice shops of the centro storico, and the one ingredient a home baker cannot approximate blind.

The old town of Naples in December, where the historic pasticcerie around Piazza San Domenico Maggiore and along Spaccanapoli put out trays of all four Christmas sweets from the feast of the Immaculate Conception onwards. Scaturchio, on the piazza, is the best-known window if you want a fixed point.

Walk via San Gregorio Armeno while you are there, the street of the nativity-scene workshops. It is impassable with crowds in December and it is also where the Neapolitan Christmas is visible all at once: the figurine shops, the grocers selling pisto loose, the sweet stalls.

Outside the city, the tradition is strong in Torre del Greco, Nola and across the agro nolano, where village pastry shops make a rougher, less sweet version.

For the widest possible contrast, detour to Soriano Calabro in Calabria, where mostaccioli are hard hand-modelled honey figures sold at the San Domenico fair: same name, same Roman ancestor, an entirely different sweet.