Panpepato

Panpepato is cooked honey, whole toasted almonds and hazelnuts, candied fruit, cocoa and spices, held together by very little flour, pressed into a low round and baked slowly. It slices into thin wedges and keeps for months.

The name names the ingredient that separates it from everything else in the Italian Christmas repertoire: black pepper, which is not a background note here but a warmth that arrives at the end of every bite. That is exactly where panpepato parts company with panforte, whose best-selling version dropped both the pepper and the cocoa to become pale and sweet.

Structurally it is not a cake. There is no leavening, no eggs, no butter. Sugar cooked with honey to the soft-ball stage cements the nuts as it cools; the flour is a binder and accounts for less than a tenth of the weight in a good one.

It is baked on a sheet of ostia, an edible starch wafer that stops the mass sticking and stays fused to the base. It is a medieval detail that survived unchanged, and you eat it.

Three towns make three different versions. Siena's is a low disc dusted with ground spice. Terni's is a dome coated in dark chocolate, with walnuts, pine nuts, cooked must and coffee in the mix. Ferrara's is shaped like a bishop's mitre and also chocolate-coated. All three are called panpepato or pampepato, and knowing one gives you no idea of the other two.

Honey first, then dried fruit, then a slow build of spice, and finally the pepper, which lands at the back of the throat about two seconds after you swallow. It is warmth rather than heat, and it is the reason people who find panforte cloying tend to prefer this.

Underneath there is bitter cocoa, the tannic edge of almond skins, the resin of pine nuts in the Umbrian versions, and sharp bursts of candied citron. The sweetness is high but the finish is dry and bitter, which keeps it in balance.

Texture is the shock for anyone expecting cake: dense, chewy, verging on hard, with whole nuts to work through. A wedge takes real chewing. This is deliberate: the sweet was built to be nutritious, expensive and long-lasting, and softness was never part of the brief.

The chocolate-coated versions from Terni and Ferrara read differently: rounder, more obviously dessert-like, with the coffee and cooked must adding a dark, almost savoury depth.

Cut it into thin wedges, no more than half a centimetre, with a smooth blade warmed under hot water and dried. A serrated knife drags the nuts out instead of cutting them. Twenty to thirty grams is a portion: this is a tasting sweet, not a slice of cake.

Serve at room temperature. Straight from a cold larder it is rock hard and the spices go mute; half an hour out fixes it.

The most interesting use is savoury. Shaved thin over aged pecorino toscano, gorgonzola or a blue goat's cheese, panpepato works the way a fruit paste does but with more going on: the pepper and cocoa bridge the honey and the salt. Tuscans have done this for a long time.

Chopped coarsely it makes granella for semifreddo or fiordilatte gelato. Crumbled into sweetened ricotta with a thread of honey it becomes a spoon dessert in five minutes.

It sits at room temperature, wrapped in its own paper or closed in a tin, for four to six months. There is very little free water in the dough and the cooked sugar holds what there is, which is why it was built to last a winter in an unheated house. Across those months it keeps drying and hardening, and the spices settle into one another, so the pepper reads rounder in February than it did in December. The date on the box is the maker's own reference point.

Chocolate-coated versions run shorter, three or four months, because chocolate takes up the smells around it and above roughly 25 °C the fat migrates and surfaces as white patches. The fridge is the wrong answer: its damp air makes the surface tacky and the cold takes the dough past the point where it slices cleanly. Once the disc has been cut, cover the cut face with film and leave it in the cupboard. Freezing adds nothing, since the cupboard already spans the whole life of the thing.

Hold a cut slice up to the light. A good panpepato is almost entirely nuts and candied peel held together by a thin veil of dark dough, and if you see a lot of paste and few almonds, flour was used to bring the cost down. The hazelnuts and almonds should be whole and toasted, since nut rubble means processing offcuts went in. On the base there should be a sheet of wafer, the ostia, stuck firmly to the dough; versions without it exist and are almost always industrial.

Taste the finish, because that is where the name is earned. Honey and dried fruit come first, then a warm, faintly biting tail of pepper a beat later. With no pepper at all you are holding a dark panforte under a borrowed name, which is what a good many boxes sold abroad contain. Panforte Margherita is the pale cousin dusted with icing sugar, and German Lebkuchen, stacked in the same aisle at Christmas, is softer and cakey by comparison.

Artisan panpepato runs 20 to 35 euro a kilo in Italy; the chocolate-coated Terni and Ferrara versions reach 38 to 45, because the coating adds both a process and an ingredient. Sizes run from 250 g to a kilo, with the 500 g gift format the most common.

The price is mostly nuts. Almonds and hazelnuts are the dominant cost and exceed forty per cent of the weight in a well-made one; honey is second. Anything under fifteen euro a kilo has cut both: more flour, sugar instead of honey, flavourings instead of ground spice, and you can see it in the cut face before you taste it.

Abroad, Italian delis and online grocers carry it from November to January at roughly 18 to 28 dollars a pound in the US and 28 to 45 pounds a kilo in the UK. It ships extremely well, which makes it one of the safest Italian Christmas sweets to order by post.

Read the label for pepe nero and cacao. Without both, you are buying a dark panforte with the wrong name on the box.

Siena, where the historic pastry shops along via di Città and around the Campo sell panforte and panpepato side by side. Tasting them together is the fastest way to understand the split. The season runs from late November to January, though Siena sells it year-round.

Terni, in Umbria, where pampepato is the city's own Christmas sweet and fills every pastry-shop window in December. The Marmore waterfall is a few kilometres away and the Valnerina starts just beyond it, which makes the detour easy to justify.

Elsewhere in Umbria, Perugia and the Apennine villages make plainer, uncoated, often peppery home-style versions.

Ferrara completes the picture outside both regions: its mitre-shaped pampapato is sold in the pastry shops of the Este old town and differs enough from the other two to be worth the trip. In all three cities, the Christmas markets are when the small producers without shopfronts appear.