Pinoccate

Pinoccate take their name from pinocchi, the local word for the pine nuts that make up the body of the sweet. They are recorded among the Benedictines of the Perugia area, and tradition places them as far back as the 14th century, when the paired black-and-white lozenges are said to have echoed the chequered heraldry of noble houses and to have been among the sweets thrown to the crowd or to nobles during jousts and civic festivities. Made without any flour, they rely wholly on boiled sugar for their structure, which ties them to the long line of medieval and monastic confectionery. Today they remain a fixture of Perugian Christmas, sold in facing pairs and wrapped like candies.

Firm and crisp at first bite, then yielding to a fine, sandy sugar grain that dissolves on the tongue; sweet and clean, the white lemony and bright, the black deeply cocoa-bitter, both packed with soft, oil-rich pine nuts.

A pinoccata is a crystalline sugar confection, closer to a firm fondant or tablet than to a clear, glassy candy. Sucrose and glucose syrup are boiled together to the hard-ball stage, about 121–130 °C, which drives off water to a low final moisture that sets firm; the glucose syrup acts as an interfering agent, its larger molecules crowding between the sucrose molecules to limit crystal size so the set is fine and smooth rather than coarse and gritty. Stirring in the pine nuts and working the mass on the marble seeds and controls that crystallisation, turning the syrup opaque. The wetted marble is a cold, non-stick heat sink: it chills the sheet fast to a temperature you can cut, and the lozenges must be cut while still warm, because once fully cooled the slab is hard and brittle. In the white version lemon juice supplies acid that inverts a little of the sucrose and further softens the grain; in the black, cocoa solids carry both colour and flavour. The pine-nut oils and the low water activity let the sweet keep for weeks.