dolci

Italy is not France or Spain, in that it doesn’t have a great culture for desserts, puddings or sweets. Eating in ‘Italian’ restaurants outside of Italy though, you wouldn’t necessarily get a sense of this. Sure, desserts exist, but they are not the robotic end to most meals, not by a long shot.

The big exception are the parts of Italy with deeply entrenched Arab or French traditions, mainly Sicily and Napoli, where sweets actually do make up a part of the diet, if not at the end of the meal, then at least throughout the day. (Those that drink wine with a meal tend not to crave desserts, as the body has already absorbed some sugar. As Muslims don’t drink alcohol (at least officially), there was the tendency to consume sweets. Hemingway was famous for saying that desserts are for those that don’t drink enough. And it’s mostly true. Watch those newly ‘on the wagon’: they’ll often consume vast amounts of sweets, when they formally didn’t.)

The Salento is no different, and in fact, the tendency here is to finish a meal with raw vegetables, such as fennel and maybe chicory (the first is a classic digestif all over the world, the second is better, not unlike coffee or un amaro, the classic bitter after dinner drink here in Italy).

What follows are some traditional desserts from the Salento, which are not always unique to the Salento but consumed here the same. Most of these are consumed on the odd occasion, which will explain some of the intense sweetness. And many, I should point out, have been linked historically to religion observations. These desserts are not always objectively ‘good’ to laic outsiders, as  having a dessert only once a year in religious observation is very different than sitting in a restaurant, consuming the same the dish after two roasted veal chops and a bottle of Barolo.

In other words, culture is always an ingredient.