Pandolce Genovese

Pandolce genovese is a fruit-and-nut cake that Genoa has made for Christmas for at least four hundred years. Four ingredients define it: sultanas, pine nuts, candied citron and fennel seeds. The fennel is what makes it recognisable in the first bite and what surprises anyone expecting a straightforwardly sweet Christmas cake.

There are two versions and they are not variants of each other. Pandolce alto is leavened with a natural starter, rises into a dome, stays soft and moist, and lasts about a week. Pandolce basso has no natural leavening at all, only a chemical raising agent or nothing, and stands four or five centimetres high, is dense and crumbly like a rich shortcrust, and keeps for months.

The low version is a flattened disc with a cross scored into the top. The tall one is a squat dome, usually scored as well.

Compared with the great northern Italian Christmas breads, panettone and pandoro, pandolce is far less sweet, carries much more fruit relative to dough, and lacks the butter-and-vanilla perfume that defines Milanese and Veronese pastry. Most first-time tasters place it closer to a British fruit cake than to an Italian sweet bread, and that instinct is broadly right.

Fruit and fennel, in that order. The sultanas dominate, soft and winey and concentrated, with candied citron cutting through in sharp floral bursts and pine nuts adding a resinous, slightly waxy richness that no other Italian Christmas sweet has.

Then the fennel arrives. It is subtle in a good pandolce, an aniseed shadow behind the fruit rather than a flavour of its own, and it is what stops the cake from tasting like a generic fruit loaf. Orange flower water runs alongside it.

Sweetness is low by Christmas-cake standards, and there is no vanilla, no cinnamon and no mixed spice. What you get instead is butter, dried fruit and that faint liquorice-adjacent lift.

Texture depends on which one you have. The alto is springy and moist with an irregular open crumb; the basso is short and sandy, crumbling under the knife, closer to a rich biscuit than to cake.

Serve at room temperature. Cut the alto into wedges like a panettone; cut the basso into thin slices, because it is dense and a thick slice is heavy going.

It is a cake for the end of a meal and for breakfast in equal measure. In Genoa the basso gets dunked in milk in the morning and eaten with a small glass of passito in the evening, and a day-old slice is worth thirty seconds in a dry pan to wake the butter up.

It works better with cheese than most people expect. The basso, being the less sweet of the two, holds up against aged pecorino or a mild gorgonzola, with the fennel bridging the fruit and the salt.

When the alto dries out, and it always does, toast the slices in butter, or use them for a spoon dessert with crème anglaise. Do not reheat a whole pandolce in the oven: the candied fruit caramelises at the edges and the fennel turns bitter.

The two versions behave in opposite ways, so establish which one you have. Pandolce basso, the low one, was built to keep: in a tin or wrapped in its paper it holds two or three months at room temperature, and the first weeks improve it as the butter and candied fruit settle through the crumb. It dries slowly the whole time, which is exactly why the Genoese ritual of saving a slice until 3 February, San Biagio, works at all.

Pandolce alto is the reverse, seven to ten days at most, closed in a food bag that keeps its moisture in. After that it goes dry rather than soft, and it gets toasted or dunked instead of sliced plain. The fridge helps neither: it dries the tall one within a day and leaves the low one leathery. A cool dry cupboard is the place, and anything boxed carries the baker's own date.

Both freeze well, whole or in slices, for about three months. Thaw the tall one at room temperature inside its bag, so the moisture goes back into the crumb instead of evaporating off it.

Look at a cut section. The fruit should be plentiful and spread through the whole crumb, not gathered in the middle or sunk to the bottom: raisins, pine nuts and diced candied citron should turn up in every slice. Find the pine nuts and check that they are whole and pale. Industrial versions swap in flaked almonds, which cost a third as much and are obvious on sight.

Smell it. Fennel seed and orange flower water should both be present, with neither one taking over. One that smells only of butter and vanilla is a generic fruit cake with the wrong name on the box.

On the tall version, read the holes: irregular and elongated is the mark of a long natural rise, while small round holes all the same size mean a heavy dose of baker's yeast and a short schedule. On the low version, judge the crumble, which should shed a few crumbs under the knife; a rubbery one was overworked. Abroad it sits beside panettone, which is taller, lighter and far less dense with fruit.

In Genoa, from the pastry shops of the old town, at 18 to 28 euro a kilo for the basso and 22 to 34 for the alto. Standard sizes are 500 g and 1 kg. The basso is available in the city year-round, which is unusual for an Italian Christmas sweet; the alto appears only in December and is worth ordering in advance from a shop that genuinely uses a natural starter.

Industrial tins run 8 to 14 euro a kilo. The gap is fruit percentage, since artisan versions push it towards half the total weight, and pine nuts, which cheap producers replace with flaked almonds. You can see both in a cut slice.

Abroad, only the basso travels: 14 to 22 dollars a pound in US Italian delis, 22 to 35 pounds a kilo in the UK, almost exclusively in December. The alto is rarely exported because its shelf life does not survive the journey.

Check the ingredient list for finocchio or fennel seed. A pandolce without it is a fruit cake wearing the wrong name.

Genoa, in the caruggi, the narrow lanes of the old town, where the historic pasticcerie sit within a few dozen metres of each other. Via Soziglia is the street: Pietro Romanengo fu Stefano, confectioners since 1780 and still candying their own fruit, and Klainguti, trading since the early nineteenth century, tell the city's sweet history between them.

The Mercato Orientale, the covered market off via XX Settembre, is where Genoese households buy the candied peel and dried fruit to make it at home, which many still do.

Along the coast, the pasticcerie of Camogli, Santa Margherita and the Cinque Terre villages make their own versions. The Cinque Terre trip pairs well with the cake for a specific reason: Sciacchetrà, the local passito, is the wine pandolce is meant to be drunk with, and the producers sell directly.

December is the season, but Genoa is the one place you can buy a good basso in July.