It is the first thing you eat as soon as you arrive in Salento: a sweet welcome that then matches the holiday. What else but the Typical Italian cake with custard cream filling? Two layers of shortcrust pastry that enclose a very soft custard, it is a dessert simple but full of flavor and rich in history, tradition and love just like its land. He was born in the pastry shop Ascalone of Galatina in the mid-eighteenth century, when the then patron Nicola put together a little dough and leftover cream to welcome the faithful who arrived in the village for the feast of St. Paul (the protector of tarantate): since then everyone has loved him and today he is also symbol of rebirth in a dedicated day, the Pasticciotto day.
It falls on June 1st, and we celebrate from 2020: the horrible year of the pandemic. To make it a little bit more special the day of departure – which also last year coincided with the opening of bars and restaurants to the public – the Salento pastry chefs have decided to start over from this sweet full of meaning and celebrate with everyone: with operators and patients of many hospitals in the province of Lecce and other Italian cities to whom they delivered it personally to give a break, and with us customers of their pastry shops, offering it at the symbolic cost of 60 cents.
This year the initiative – born on the input of Agrocepaciok pastry shop, created in collaboration with associations of white art professionals and promoted by the Events Marketing & Communication agency – repeats itself with the same formula and even bigger: over 130 pastry chefs have already joined all over Italy (plus one – Salento doc – in Barcelona) already at work to bring pasticciotti to hospitals and to offer all of us one more reason to eat them and smile (the list of patisseries that adhere is on www.agrogepaciok.it).
A simple gesture, which however makes us remember how important the little things are, like the habit of eating a traditional dessert in one’s favorite pastry shop. “The pandemic has stopped our work, and we immediately thought that our dessert par excellence was the best world to start over, and start a tradition that we want to consolidate”, he says. Giuseppe Zippo, president of the Salento Confartigianato Imprese Lecce Association and patron of the pastry shop The Thousand Cravings in Specchia (Lecce). “The pasticciotto – continues Zippo – has now become a symbol of Salento: partly because with its simplicity and at the same time its richness it represents its identity, and then because everyone likes it, you can eat it anywhere and it is made with few but genuine ingredients. Now there are many variations but the original recipe, registered, includes shortcrust pastry and only classic custard ».
The secret of a good pasticciotto? The freshness. «The pastry – concludes Zippo – must be crunchy and the cream soft: a pasticciotto with moistened shortcrust pastry and dry cream is an old pasticciotto. To be appreciated, this dessert must be eaten freshly made: you will see what a difference “. To try immediately in the gallery above the original pasticciotto recipe unveiled by Giuseppe Zippo
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