Anna Maria Tardiolo -In Sicily, in Palermo and the surrounding area, when the eve dinner and Christmas lunch were over, friends and relatives who went to visit each other’s home, often brought Buccellati or whatever they are called as a gift to share. in dialect, the cucciddata. If the king of the table in those same days, in the North, were and are Panettone and Pandoro, in Palermo they are buccellati or buccellato. It is the same dessert but the former are presented as single-portion filled biscuits, the latter has a unique donut shape. What makes the difference, however, is the moment of their preparation. Until a few years ago, that of Buccellati was a tradition to be shared with family and closest friends. Although there is a universal recipe, each family added some secret ingredient, whether it was in the pastry dough or in the method of assembling the ingredients. The guardians of this are still older women.

Thus, a few days before Christmas the female members of the family and the closest friends, from the oldest to the youngest, gathered. Each had its own task. The processing is laborious, the passages long. The filling is made up of dried almonds or figs, cocoa, raisins, walnuts, candied fruit, coffee and sugar. For this reason, each step was entrusted to a member of the family: the most expert dedicated themselves to cooking almonds or figs, the less expert to peeling almonds, assembling and decorating. Around the worktops, the gathered women began to tell stories of their childhood, of the family, of people who took part in the preparation of buccellati in the previous decades while the sweet aroma of biscuits spread to every corner of the house. Laughter, happiness, the moment of celebration invaded the minds of those who took part in this ‘rite’, one could almost say. The children were given a little shortcrust pastry to allow them to play and hope they were good. But no matter how much effort could be made, noticing the mothers, grandmothers, aunts intent on something else, the little ones ran around the table trying to sneak some almonds, now a few pieces of candied pumpkin or cocoa. Since it was possible to keep the buccellati for a long time, each family baked kilos and kilos well aware that they would only have the opportunity to produce more the following year.

It was a magical moment. Even before the decorations, lights and markets, the Christmas atmosphere began to breathe when the buccellati were prepared. Then when the biscuits were cooked it was possible to decorate them either with a sprinkling of icing sugar or with a creamy sugar glaze and a handful of colored sugar tails called in Sicilian ‘diavulicchi’. It is no coincidence that these multicolored sugars are used. Allegorically, these sweet decorative elements recall the mythological figures frescoed in the Palazzo della Zisa in Palermo. Legend has it that a huge treasure in gold coins was enclosed in this building and there were an indefinable number of little devils in its custody. The collective imagination wants the multicolored sprinkles of the sugars to resemble these mysterious keepers. Thinking about it, however, the ‘diavulicchi’ are also guardians of a hidden treasure that is revealed when the biscuit is broken even if the real one, the one kept in the memories of a family and in the secrets of its ingredients, that will always be kept. from diavulicchi…