Pitta 'Nchiusa Calabrese

Calabria (interior and hill towns)

Calabria's ancient filled Christmas pastry — a sealed tart of short pastry encasing a filling of dried figs, raisins, walnuts, almonds, honey, vincotto (cooked grape must), cinnamon, cloves, and 'nduja for the occasional savoury variant. The sealed pitta (from the same Greek word that gives us Pitta bread — 'flat baked thing') is decorated with pastry cuts or impressions before baking, and the dried fruit filling develops an almost jam-like consistency during baking as the honey and vincotto caramelise. A Christmas and feast-day preparation found across the Calabrian interior.

• Both are dried fig-and-nut filled pastries from the same Sicilian-Calabrian confectionery tradition — Sicilian cuccidati are individual cookies with figgy-walnut filling, Calabrian pitta 'nchiusa is a large sealed tart with the same filling principle, both using vincotto as the binding medium for the dried fruit filling → Cuccidati (Fig Cookies) Sicilian
• Both are sealed pastry cases with a dense dried fruit-and-spice filling baked at Christmas — British uses suet-bound mixed fruit with citrus and spice in short pastry, Calabrian uses vincotto-bound figs and nuts in rich lard pastry, both representing the pan-European tradition of sealed pastry as a Christmas confectionery medium → Mince Pie British

Rich, dark dried fruit caramelised in vincotto and honey, encased in crumbling short pastry — ancient flavours of the Calabrian winter table