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Sienna Candy
(Italy.) Boil 1 pint of honey, 2 pounds of chopped almonds, 3/4 pound of chopped filberts or pecans, a teaspoonful of cinnamon in powder, and 1/2 pound of grated chocolate. When thick and smooth, cool and roll out, cut into round cakes and dry in the oven.
This is a stripped-down panforte, the nut-and-honey confection of Siena, and it behaves like candy rather than cake. The whole thing turns on how far you boil the honey.
- The hinge: the honey stage"when thick and smooth" is the cook's only guide, and everything depends on it. Under-boiled, the mass stays a paste that never sets and weeps syrup; boiled far past that point it will be hard and brittle once cool.
- Work fast and work warmThe recipe boils everything together, so the mass comes off the heat already loaded with nuts. Turn it out promptly: it stiffens as it cools and cannot be rolled once cold. Damp hands, an oiled rolling pin, or a sheet of parchment on each side all help; panforte is often pressed onto edible rice paper for the same reason.
- FilbertsFilberts are hazelnuts. Toast and skin them first, and toast the almonds too; raw nuts make the candy taste flat.
- Grated chocolateIn a book of this period this generally meant a hard block, unsweetened or only lightly sweetened. The recipe's 1/2 pound is 8 oz; unsweetened or very dark chocolate, chopped fine, is the nearest modern equivalent. Modern semisweet chips add sugar the honey does not need and are stabilised to resist melting.
- "Dry in the oven"Not baking. Use as slow an oven as you can, and only long enough to set the surface. Anything hotter scorches the honey and the nuts at the edges.
- Cutting the roundsCut while the sheet is still warm and pliable, about 1/2 inch thick; a floured or oiled biscuit cutter works. Cold panforte has to be sawn with a heavy knife.
- Yield and keepingThe ingredients as weighed come to something over 4 lb before drying. Dusted with confectioners' sugar and wrapped, it keeps for weeks; the sugar-saturated honey is what preserves it.
- Sweetness and spiceA pint of honey to under 3 lb of nuts is very sweet by current taste, and one teaspoon of cinnamon is faint for this volume. Sienese versions usually carry cloves, white pepper, coriander and candied peel as well, and a pinch of salt is worth adding.
Panforte — literally "strong bread" — is the obvious model for this recipe, a pressed cake of honey, almonds, candied fruit and spices associated with Siena since the Middle Ages, when the city sat on the pilgrim road north and its apothecaries handled the pepper, cloves and cinnamon arriving through the Mediterranean trade. The heavily peppered version is still sold as panpepato, and the spicing in these confections was originally a display of access to costly imports as much as a matter of flavour. The chocolate here is a later addition, and the omission of candied citron and flour marks this as a simplification: the elaborate spice mixture becomes a single teaspoon of cinnamon and the pressed disc becomes rolled-and-cut "round cakes". The spelling "Sienna" for Siena may reflect the looser English usage of the period.