When I think of Italian Christmas I think of panettone and
Dominick the Italian Christmas donkey, and if you haven't heard that song
go look it up after we make this 130 year old recipe for panettone.
A recipe that I warn you will cause controversy.
So thank you to Hellofresh for sponsoring this video
as we make panettone this time on Tasting History.
So before we start I wanted to thank Carl Wolwen for recording
all of the wonderful guitar Christmas music
that you have been hearing over the last couple Christmas episodes, and!.....
right there. Just lovely.
Now today's recipe comes from the 1891 cookbook-
Nay, masterpiece.
'La Scienza in Cucina: L'Arte di Mangiar Bene' by Pellegrino Artusi.
And there's not much controversy around the book
or him in fact he's often called the Father of Italian Cuisine.
No the controversy comes from one specific recipe.
Se panettone Marietta seems like a pretty standard recipe until you realize
there is no yeast. I'm skeptical.
See a traditional panettone usually takes three days to make and includes 24 hours of multiple rises
but Artusi did not have that kind of patience,
so his recipe employs baking soda and cream of tartar
and despite the multitude of mamma mias that I'm going to get from my Italian audience
I did decide to make this recipe for two reasons.
First, other recipes for panettone haven't really changed much over the last 120 years
and so you might as well just go buy a panettone if you want to see what it tasted like back then which
I have and I'm going to be using this as my control when I taste the other version.
Second, I wanted to see what this other version not only tastes like but also feels like,
the texture because it is going to be quite different but Artusi really talks it up.
"Panettone Marietta. My Marietta is a good cook, and so good-hearted and honest
that she deserves that I named this cake after her,
especially since she taught me how to make it...
In winter, soften the butter... and mix it with the eggs.
Add the flour and milk a little at a time,
then the rest of the ingredients minus the sultanas and powders,
which you should save for last.
But before adding them, work the mixture for at least half an hour...
pour it into a mold twice as large as the amount of batter...
Grease the walls with butter, sprinkle with powdered sugar mixed with flour,
and bake in the oven... this panettone deserves to be recommended because it's
much better than the Milan panettone that's sold in stores,
and requires little trouble to make."
The SHADE he throws at that Milan style panettone,
vicious! You don't often find trash talk in a recipe.
Now the woman who lends her name this recipe is Marietta Sabatini
who started out as his housekeeper,
and then became his cook and really his personal assistant
who was very, very instrumental in all of his work.
And when you learn that she was a housekeeper and cook you realize
why this recipe is the way that it is.
She doesn't have time to be making three day bread, she's a busy woman!
She's got things to do and this was before she had the time saving option of ordering
from Hellofresh, today's sponsor.
Now even if you're not a 19th century housekeeper, Hellofresh is a great way to save time.
I really appreciate the fact that I don't have to
go to the grocery store as much, especially at this time of year,
because everything arrives on your doorstep pre-portioned for you and your family which cuts down on food waste.
Then there is a never-ending selection giving you plenty of variety whether
you're vegetarian pescatarian or just watching your calories.
Or none of the above. And everything arrives fresh to your door in sustainable packaging,
and the meals are quick and easy to make, like the one pan pork fajita lettuce wraps that I made last night.
They were so easy that I was able to make them even after a full day of baking panettone.
There was just the perfect amount of spice especially when coupled with plenty of sour cream.
So go to hellofresh.com and use code tastinghistory14 for up to 14 free meals and three free gifts,
that's code tastinghistory14 for up to 14 free meals at hellofresh.com, and you'll still have plenty of time to make today's panettone.
And for that recipe what you'll need is: 2 and 3/4 cups or 300 grams of sifted cake flour,
7 tablespoons or 100 grams of unsalted butter softened.
A heaping 1/3 cup or 80 grams of sugar,
a half cup or 80 grams of sultanas. You can use dark or light sultanas or raisins.
The gold sultanas are supposed to represent gold coins that you will get in the new year, but dark sultanas
will probably look better whichever you use pour a little water to plump them up. Oops I accidentally
used Jamaican rum instead, oh well. Luckily either rum or whiskey are perfectly acceptable for a
traditional panettone. 1 whole egg and 2 yolks, 3/4 teaspoon of salt, 1 tablespoon or 10 grams of
cream of tartar, 1 teaspoon or 5 grams of baking soda, a heaping tablespoon or 20 grams of candied
fruit in tiny pieces, the zest of 1 lemon, and 4/5 of a cup or 200 milliliters of milk.
So first whip the butter in a large bowl and then add the eggs and mix until smoothish.
It's probably going to look curdled but that's actually okay.
Next add in the sifted flour and the milk just a bit at a time alternating between the two.
Now at this point you should have a nice smooth batter similar to a very thick
pancake batter. You don't want it too loose because all of the fruit and sultanas will just
fall to the bottom when you bake it, so go to the thicker side.
Then mix in the sugar and the salt then the lemon zest and the candied fruit.
At this point he says to mix it for a half hour but if you're using a stand mixer or a hand mixer about 7 or 8 minutes should do just fine.
Then mix in the sultanas and finally in a separate bowl add the cream of tartar to the baking soda,
mix them together and then add them to the batter and stir until incorporated.
Then you have to decide what size panettone you want. You can go with the traditional large size
or the also quite traditional slightly smaller size.
Now this is probably going to be determined on what they have at the store because
you didn't think far ahead enough to order a larger size so you had to go with what was available
but luckily the smaller size is probably going to be even better because you're not going to finish the whole thing in one sitting then,
and that's sensible.
Whichever you choose whisk together a bit of powdered sugar and flour
and then butter the mold and coat the inside with the mixture.
Then add the batter until it's just a little more than halfway up the side of the mold
and then set them on a baking sheet and pop them into the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or 175 Celsius for 50 minutes to an hour.
And while they bake we can look back on the history, most of which I'm pretty sure is just made up, of panettone.
So nobody knows when the first panettone was made,
the ancient Romans had breads with fruit and sweetened with honey but they wouldn't bear much resemblance to a panettone.
Nor would the sweet fruit-filled breads of Medieval Italy because they would more resemble a modern day fruitcake
but just because nobody actually knows where panettone started that doesn't mean that they haven't
pretended like they did by making up outlandish stories.
The two most famous stories take place in the 1490s during the reign of Ludovico Sforza Duke of Milan and famed patron of Leonardo Da Vinci.
The first story begins in the palace on Christmas Eve.
Upstairs the castle is brimming with merriment guests of Il Doce dancing and working up an appetite for the Christmas feast.
Particularly for the Christmas dessert possibly a mince pie who knows,
but downstairs the chef has just opened the door to the oven
to find that his dessert has burnt.
I'm ruined he says and he would have been if he didn't have a lowly kitchen servant named Tony who came up to him and said
the Duke can have my Christmas dessert.
It seems that Tony had a little loaf of Christmas bread that he made with eggs, and
butter, and sugar, and fine flour, and raisins that he had gotten from the cupboard.
Well the chef was so happy that he decided to overlook the fact that little Tony was a thief and had stolen food
from the pantry of the Duke, a crime that would probably put him in prison and instead took the
bread up to Sforza for him to eat.
While the Duke tried it he loved it and said who made this bread
and the chef sent up Tony and said it was my it was my assistant Tony, and Sforza dubbed the bread
pane di Tony or bread of Tony.
Now the other story has a lot of similarities but instead of a poor little kitchen boy it's a nobleman who bakes the bread.
See Ughetto degli Atellani was a noble in the court of Duke Ludovico Sforza,
and Ughetto had fallen in love with Adalgisa the daughter of a baker
named Tony. You see where this is going?
Well Ughetto wanted to marry Adalgisa but to do so he needed the Duke's permission and there was no way that
Sforza was going to allow such a mismatched marriage to take place in his court,
but Ughetto had an idea.
He dressed up as a peasant and went to work in the bakery but when he got to the bakery he brought along some ingredients
that only a wealthy noble would be able to afford for their bread,
like fine flour, eggs, sugar, raisins, and butter.
Well somehow this Italian noble learned how to bake bread and he did so with aplomb
making such a wondrous loaf that by selling them the baker himself became wealthy.
Even Duke Sforza tried this loaf coming from Tony's bakery and loved it so much that he dubbed it pane de Tony.
And somehow this made it okay for the noblemen to marry the daughter of the now i guess wealthy baker.
It makes no sense. Neither story makes any sense but that's how it is and you just kind of wonder
how much of history is just people making up stories.
Anyway obviously the name panettone did not come from pan del Tony or pan de Tony or anything to do with anyone named Tony.
It's probably more mundane like a combination of the words panetto and -one
which come to basically mean large cake.
Though in his history of Milan the 18th century writer Pietro Verri called it
pane di Tono which in his dialect meant luxury cake,
and it was probably that luxury cake that was served to the students of the Collegio Borromeo in Pavia in 1599.
Records show that the students were given a Christmas bread of butter and raisins.
Now by the end of the 19th century in Milan there was a bread called panettoni that was made around Christmas and it was
rather labor intensive to make but the three-day labor-intensive process didn't become popular until after WWI.
In 1919 Angelo Motta came home from military service and opened a bakery in Milan
and he is credited with standardizing the three-day baking process a well as cooling the bread upside down
so that it doesn't collapse in on itself. This gives the modern panettone its classic shape,
and Motta's cakes sold like gangbusters.
Until 1921, only two years later, when rival baker Giacchino Alemagna said
well if Angelo can do it so can I, and thus kicked off the panettone wars of the 1920s and 30s.
Though it seems to have just ended in a stalemate because both
Motta and Alemagna panettone are still available for purchase today.
Now those two are what you would call the traditional panettone,
but as Italians traveled the world they brought panettone with them and changed it up.
They added things like chocolate and figs and different cream fillings,
and since the mid-1800s in Lima Peru it's been made with candied papaya.
So even though our panettone Marietta is quite different from the traditional
Motta or Alemagna panettone it comes from a long line of bastardized panettone recipes,
So I think we're in the clear.
So you'll know that your panettone is done when the top has puffed up into a dome and has a couple cracks on it
and just starts to brown.
Then take them out of the oven and let them cool. Since these aren't yeasted you don't have to cool them upside down but
that'd be fun.
And here we are panettone Marietta.
All right so the color is beautiful but
a lot of my fruit fell to the bottom. There's some scattered around but the majority fell to the bottom
That's a mess up on my part, make your batter a little bit thicker.
It's so hard to tell
with a new recipe. It's kind of something that you gotta gotta test out.
Let's give it a shot.
*Munch munch
It's a little dry...
but the flavor is very nice.
I thought it might be kind of dry simply based on the quantities of ingredients that Artusi calls for.
It's good. The flavor is very, very nice and it would be really good with like you know a cup
of coffee or very often today panettone is eaten with a little bit of mascarpone cheese.
That'd be great. The thing is even the regular panettone is often dry.
Let's give it a shot. I'm gonna just-
I'm a barbarian. I'm going to just tear off some. You know obviously the fruit is is very well
incorporated and you can tell that the texture is just going to be more bread-like than cake-like.
The other one has a a cake-like crumb, this is more bread-like.
Let's give it a shot.
What's interesting is that the flavor is almost identical.
The texture is not.
The texture of this is much lighter. I mean that's what the three days is for, to get that light airy texture.
And it's not too dry. I've had dryer panettone.
Yeah Artusi you're wrong the the Milan style, Milanese, panettone is better,
and so the verdict is, while this is easy it doesn't take much time,
just go buy your panettone that's also easy and that doesn't take much time
and it's really, really wonderful.
But no matter what you eat this holiday season make sure to have a merry merry Christmas
and follow me on Instagram @tastinghistorywithmaxmiller
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
I'm sticking with the old panettone, meh!
~Happy Holidays~