Torrone - Chasing a Delightful Legend

 

Torrone - Chasing a Delightful Legend

I recall enjoying Torrone as a kid though not often. Although few and far between, its arrival was always memorable. These domino size, snow-white nougat cakes teaming with nuts seemed reserved for Italian weddings and especially Christmas. I recall my mother breaking

Our Christmas Torrone Treats

out the torrone after our long-awaited Christmas dinner as a very special species of treat. In my youth, torrone was reserved only for special moments like these. Mom used to talk about how items, plentiful today, like turkeys, only appeared in the market on holidays. Much like the elusive turkey, this confection was apparently not available year-round, at least not for us. Some may think it a dessert. I can see that, but for me, it was more like an exotic candy, a treat the Wise Men might covet. I’d no idea what this concoction of sugary paste they called nougat might be. I simply knew it was rare, tasted wonderful, was hard to come by, and was seemingly associated with a man in a red suit, and occasionally with a pretty woman in a white dress. At least to me, because of its seeming rarity, I considered it a valuable treat occasionally available at our neighborhood aromatic Italian market from Signori Raucci and Vasile. It came sandwiched between what appeared to be a thin, wafer-like top and bottom, also edible, and all the better to hold it for the few seconds it survived between my fingers. To get at the inner part, the nougat and nuts, I enjoyed popping off the wafer topping like the cookie cake on an Oreo. In my childish mind, this was much like Winni-the-Pooh harvesting “a smackerel” of the sticky-licky stuff from a convenient hive. And of all places to revive such memories, I was reminded of this treat recently not in the long-gone Raucci & Vasile market, but in the isle of a modern supermarket. Seeing the boxes there on a shelf was as though its long absence was calling me. Past and present seemed to become one as memories of 

Forget the Ashtrays,
No 'Butts" About This

mom slicing the ivory bar into cubes, my sisters and I huddled about, jolted through me. For the total of $7.99, I was reunited with a part of me from the shadowy past that I’d misplaced; I bought two boxes. My torrone find came individually boxed inside a larger box, eighteen all told, all the way from distant New Jersey. Forget the merely twelve days of Christmas, I’d now updated that Christmas tune, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” to eighteen.

Some moments in time have been momentous enough to have lasted forever. They are celebrated, sometimes reviled, but nevertheless, in retrospect, remembered. Either way, the first appearance of torrone was not one of those instances. It lacked a star in the East for Wise Men to follow and others to chronicle. While torrone goes way back, the vagaries that accompany long past events, if there really is a discrete event, make it difficult to develop a coherent picture of who was involved, where it occurred, and when that may have been. Like so many other events unremembered, its origin remains obscure. What is clear is that my brief survey of what scant information exists revealed that the rudimentary beginning of this celebrated delight authored many a claim to birthplace and founding father.

 In the early ages, China was home to almonds. Almonds, along with spices, migrated to the West. Some believe torrone may have originated in China in a nougat ancestor, and with the help of Phoenician traders, who ruled the Mediterranean, made its way along to Italian shores. We presently get a lot from China. Should we add torrone to the list? I’d much rather believe it is Italian in origin, and there is evidence to support this theory when we step back in time again, this time to the region of present day Campania that was once home to the Samnites, an ancient tribal people of central Italy. It is here that this exquisite dolce is thought to have had its beginning.

“Texts from the second and first centuries B.C. claim the Samnites, an ancient civilization [circa 500 B.C.] of present-day Campania that battled with the Roman Republic, invented a delicacy comprised of seed oils, egg whites, and honey” ^[1].

While there is no hint as to whether they had inherited it from the even older neighboring Etruscans (circa 1100 B.C.), legend goes on to say:

“… that after the Roman defeat in the Caudina Valley [summer of 321 B.C. during the Samnite Wars], the Samnites offered this delicacy to the Romans who, if they survived, would bear witness to their greatness. The cupedia had the double purpose of feeding the Romans, who were about to die of starvation, as well as consoling them^.[2]

This may account for its arrival in multicultural Rome. The Romans, as told by historian Titus Livius, liked to eat a confection based on honey and almonds called "cupedia,” the Samnite name for torrone.

“According to some Roman historians and writers such as Titus Livius and Martial, in ancient Rome, there was a very similar recipe called cupedia or cupeto.” ^[2]

Its presence in Rome as an ancient treat is confirmed in the cloudy writings of Marcus Gavius Apicius, a celebrated 1st-century A.D. gourmet during the reign of Tiberius. He is someone we’d likely label a foodie today. In the latter part of the third century, his culinary canon was used to create an ancient cookbook, De Re Coquinaria (On the Subject of Cooking), surprisingly still available today. This most ancient European cookbook, its incompleteness marred by a hurried hand void of literary skill making it hard to follow, and with exact amounts of ingredients missing, is more observational than precise. This early witness to Roman cuisine nevertheless includes a description of nucatum (nougat), a sweet made of honey, walnuts, and egg whites. Ergo torrone? Is it that straightforward?

Following the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D., cupedia and nucatum 

Page from 12th Century
Arabic Remedy Manuscript

disappeared, which lends support to torrone’s Arab origin. The contested confection may have derived from a Muslim recipe prevalent in a region known as Al-Andalus (Andalusia). This  Muslim-ruled area of the Iberian Peninsula (711-1492 A.D.) occupied most of what we today know as Spain. There the Muslim sweet was known as el turron, which derives from the verb “turrar”, to roast. This might also explain the existence of turron or torrone in southern Italy, Sicily in particular, due to its once 400-year Arab domination beginning in 827 A.D. There was also an earlier more eastern version of this sweet. The 15th-century Islamic cookbook Kitab al Tibakhah by Ibn al-Mabrad describes “a recipe with egg whites”, called Hulwa, along with honey and nuts that is very similar to nougat.^[3]

Still, its most popular and most recent origination tale points to a historical 25 October 1441 document as the day of its appearance, or at least its mention, in Cremona, a city in the northern region of Lombardy also known as the birthplace of the world-renowned Stradivarius violin and Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi (La Cage aux Folles). This is date certain proof enough for the nearby Milanese. It coincides with the politically arranged wedding in Cremona —in that city's cathedral for security reasons since the groom was at war with her father — of general

Duke of Milan
Francesco Sforza

Francesco Sforza and teenaged Bianca Maria Visconti, soon to follow as the next Duke and Duchess of Milan.

“According to the written account, the wedding celebrations took place in Cremona's main piazza and lasted three days and three nights. The Visconti family asked the court pastry chefs to create a new cake for the occasion. The cooks came up with a dense, hard cake made from whipped honey, almonds, and egg whites. Their aim was to make a long, rectangular dessert that resembled the famous campanili (bell tower) that flanks Cremona's cathedral. They aptly name the cake torrone, which resembles the word torrione for tower.” ^[1]

But no one is sure how the wedding bakers in Cremona came up with their recipe. Was it really invention? Its appearance may have been from the hands of physicist 

No Longer the Teenager, 
Meet Bianca Maria Visconti, 
Duchess of Milan

Gerardo of Cremona, not in his kitchen but as a 12th-century scholar who in the process of translating Arabic works uncovered turùn and may have introduced it to his hometown. Other historians claim it arrived there with Giambonino, coincidentally also from Cremona, who translated works written by two Arab doctors from Baghdad [into Latin while in Venice towards the end of the 13th century].^[1] It is likely then that the dessert may have been known in Cremona for centuries. Some attribute its arrival in Northern Italy to gourmet Holy Roman Emperor Federico II of Swabia, who during his military campaigns stayed in Cremona sixteen times along with his entourage of Sicilian cooks well-versed in Arab culture.^[1]

After many Google probes into medieval cookery, I was lucky to come across an intriguing recipe. From Spain, it is one from the cache of Arabic documents that likely accumulated in Cremona. This Arabic tome compiled in 1400 derived from earlier manuscripts which roughly spanned 1150 to 1230 A.D., contained about five hundred Arab language recipes. Known as the Maghreb Manuscript, its trove included a particular dry dessert labeled Mu'aqqad. While it was translated into English by Charles Perry only in 2005, some long-ago enterprising Italian like Gerardo, Giambonino, or a Cremona ducal pastry chef just might have decoded it or possibly one of its earlier parent texts. It was reported in 1184 that that Holy Roman Emperor who had made those many stops in Cremona, had a court and kitchen staff that relied on Muslims right down to his cooks.^[7] To speculate further, the complete manuscript or a scribbled note on how to make Mu'aqqad could easily have been brought along in a traveler’s or merchant’s saddlebag. However the recipe arrived, you will see it reads very much like the description for making torrone:

“Put a kail of comb honey on a moderate fire until it dissolves, then strain it and return it to the fire. Then beat the whites of twenty-five eggs, if comb honey, and thirty if not, and throw them into the honey. Beat the mixture with a confectionery cane until it whitens and thickens. Then throw in a ratl [about a pound] of peeled almonds and serve it, God willing.” ^[8]

Success indeed spawns many fathers, often various birthdates, certainly tales, and apparently has claims from multiple ethnic groups.

In memory of the Ducal wedding, each year

Cremona Italy's Piazza Where the 
Sforza Duke of Milan Wedding
is Still Celebrated

in the third week of November, the people of Cremona celebrate the delicious nougat candy through La Festa del Torrone, an eight-day extravaganza that includes a reenactment of the Duke and Duchesses’ legendary marriage. It is celebrated in style. In 1998 while the festival was in progress, Sperlari, Cremona's biggest and oldest torrone manufacturer, constructed a 380 foot-long (116 m) loaf of nougat weighing 1,323 pounds, with the hope of getting into the Guinness Book of World Records. Spelari employees then sliced the mega-torrone into 3,000 pieces and distributed them to attendees.^[6] That record was broken in 2011 (660 m), again in 2015 (713 m) and reset once in 2019 by a mammoth 3,293 ft (1004 m) torrone in Mazzarino, Sicily.

Nothing approaching the class of a Guinness Champion, our particular little blue boxed discovery, 

Flipside of One of Our  Little
BlueTorrone Boxes Tells
 the CremonaWedding Story

a product of Italy, was distributed by Ferrara Foods, (a division of Cento Foods). Baker and importer of over 200 superb Italian specialties, Ferrara dates its origins to 1892 when Café Ferrara first opened its doors in New York City. You can find it today at 195 Grand Street (between Mott and Mulberry Streets) in Lower Manhattan. It claims to be America’s first pasticceria and espresso bar, although when it comes to paternity claims of this nature, the folks in Boston’s Little Italy North End might beg to differ. In the eighteen-nineties, New York City had almost everything, except a place where an Italian opera lover, after a night of Verdi or Puccini, could relax, play a Neapolitan game of chance called “Scopa” (literally meaning broom) to the slap-down rhythm of a played card and drink a cup or two of espresso. That was until Italian immigrants Antonio Ferrara, an opera impresario, and professional baker, Enrico Scoppa, opened the doors to Caffé A. Ferrara. Ferrara is best not to be confused with the horrendously more expensive and spelled a tad differently, Ferrari, of the race car dynasty. It’s striking the dollar sign difference ($7.99 vs $799,000) an “i” versus an “a” can make. This period coincides with renowned Naples born tenor Enrico Caruso’s

Early Photo of Historic
Cafe Ferrara

seventeen-year American tour (1903-1920). Caruso, who made his home at John Astor’s Knickerbocker Hotel in Times Square would go on to appear in 863 Metropolitan Opera performances. Legend has it that Ferrara’s Little Italy landmark was frequented by the Naples-born tenor during his stay in New York. Caruso, so the story goes, thought the coffee there was marvelous but especially loved the cookies and cakes. Undoubtedly, over all those years, I suspect a torrone or two may have been involved.

Love of torrone is not restricted to Cremona, nor is it without its variations. You’ll find it made and consumed in every region around the boot, with each regional version of torrone featuring different ingredients complete with claims theirs is the "best." During festivals in Calitri, for example, vendors line the sides of Corso Matteotti with plenty of the two traditional versions of the treat: duro, tooth-breaking hard and brittle along with morbido, my blue box soft and chewy kind.

“The difference in making hard and soft torrone is in the cooking time and the amount of egg whites used. Hard torrone is cooked up to ten hours whereas soft torrone is cooked for no more than three hours. Because of the shorter cooking time, the soft torrone ends up with a higher concentration of water which, combined with a larger percentage of glucose, results in a softer dough.^[3]

If you can’t make it to Italy or easily find torrone nearby (one USA source Torrone Candy Company), here for the do-it-yourself chef is just one of many torrone recipes you may enjoy making. ^[5] It’s rather straightforward with no time delays like waiting for something to rise or a stint in the frig cooling. Instead, like making risotto for those who love to stir, your time is spent doing just that.

What You’ll Need (not accounting for pots and pans)

About 2.5 hours - smile, after all this is a classic Italian treat

2 (8x10-inch) sheets of Wafer Paper also called Edible Rice Paper (if hard to find, forget it)

1 ⅓ cups honey

1 cup white sugar

3 tablespoons white sugar

2 large egg whites at room temperature (so less time is spent getting them to peak)

1 pinch salt

¼ teaspoon vanilla extract

1 tablespoon lemon zest

3 cups roasted almonds

1 cup roasted pistachios

Making It (too bad my mom didn’t have Internet back then)

Ø  Line the 8x11-inch baking dish with plastic wrap, allowing ends to hang over the sides.

 

Ø  Place chopped almonds and pistachios in a single layer in a baking tray and toast in oven at 350º F for about 8 minutes or until fragrant and shiny. To make it easier to later fold them into the nougat, keep the roasted nuts in a warm place until ready to add at the end.

 

Ø  Place honey in a double boiler or large bowl over a saucepan of water on the lowest heat. Ensure that the bowl is not touching the water. Heat the honey until it melts, stirring occasionally with a wooden spoon. Pour the honey into a heavy-bottomed pot. Add that cup of sugar. Mix over low heat with a spatula for about 30 minutes, stirring constantly, until the mixture turns from grainy to smooth and silky. Remove the pot from the heat.

 

Ø  Place the egg whites in a separate mixing bowl then add a pinch of salt. Whisk until whites form soft peaks, 3 to 4 minutes. Place your heavy-bottomed pot back on low heat.

Ø Gradually whisk about a quarter of the whipped egg whites into the honey/sugar mixture and then in 3 more batches, whisk in the remaining egg whites.

 

Ø  Continue “cookin and a stirin” over low heat for 40-45 minutes (set a timer to help with this), slowly blending with a spatula until the mixture thickens and turns pale until a ribbon of the mixture drizzled on top of what you’ve been stirring doesn’t immediately incorporate back into the mixture but remains intact on the surface for a while. Another test – a drop of the mixture in a glass of ice-cold water should solidify into a soft ball, not dissolve immediately. Ideally, it should feel like soft clay.

 

Ø  Now whisk in the vanilla and lemon zest. Add the still warm almonds and pistachios and stir until they are evenly incorporated. Pour into your prepared baking dish. Even it out as best you can with a clean oiled spatula. Top with 2nd sheet of wafer

paper (edible rice paper), shiny side up. Cover with plastic wrap then press, tamping mixture down gently but firmly. Remove the top layer of plastic.

Ø  Allow your Torrone to sit at room temperature until cool, firm, and ready to cut (1 or 2 hours – I lied about waiting). Grip the edges of the bottom layer of plastic wrap and lift Torrone from baking dish. Invert and remove plastic from the bottom. If the plastic wrap is difficult to remove from the edges, you can trim off the edges.

Ø  Cut into 1-inch squares using a sharp serrated knife.

When no one is looking, go ahead and lick your tools clean.

Well, I think that by now, I’ve stirred the pot enough from the veiled depths of torrone’s derivation on to its making. Now it’s your turn, unless you hate to stir. I doubt you will develop carpal

tunnel though, so I suggest you get to it and join that vast and enduring pantheon of torrone lovers. It doesn’t matter if with that first delicious nibble you imagine yourself among the Samnites of Campania, Romans, Sicilian and Iberian Arabs, or the medieval wedding revelers of Cremona. Whoever may have been responsible for its creation or had a roll in passing it along to us today, whether that be a mom, the man in the red suit, a pretty lady in white, or the people who stock your supermarket shelves, say a prayer in thanks for all of them.

 

From That Rogue Tourist, 
Paolo

[1] The History of Torrone an Italian Christmas Dessert, La Cucina Italiana, https://www.lacucinaitaliana.com/italian-food/italian-dishes/the-history-of-torrone-an-italian-christmas-dessert

[2] 5 Places where you can find the best Nougat in Italy, We the Italians, https://wetheitalians.com/from-italy/5-places-where-you-can-find-best-nougat-italy

[3] Honey Traveler, https://www.honeytraveler.com/honey-gastronomy/nougat/

For Cookbook see Kitab al Tibakhah: A Fifteenth-Century Cookbook, Charles Perry, tr. The translation was published in Petits Propos Culinaires #21‡ , 1985. The original author is Ibn al-Mabrad (or Ibn al Mubarrad). Description provided by David A. Friedman is on pg 124 of translation at: http://daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/miscellany_pdf/Misc9recipes.pdf

[4] Types of Torrone, https://www.cento.com/articles/2017/torrone.php

[5] Torrone (Italian Nut and Nougat Confection), https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/246463/torrone-italian-nut-and-nougat-confection/

[6] Cremona Torrone Festival, https://www.deliciousitaly.com/lombardia-food-wine/cremona-torrone-festival

[7] When the West First Tasted the Cuisines of the East, Manuscript of Cookbook Survey, Charles Perry, https://www.manuscriptcookbookssurvey.org/tag/charles-perry/

[8] An Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook of the 13th Century, Translated by Charles Perry, http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Medieval/Cookbooks/Andalusian/andalusian_contents.htm