'Mpanatigghi

A sweet from the Spanish centuries of Sicily. 'Mpanatigghi are thought to have been introduced during Spanish rule over the Kingdom of Sicily in the sixteenth century, the name itself descending from the Spanish empanada, the same idea of a filling wrapped in pastry; the startling marriage of meat and chocolate reached the island in the same period from Spain's American colonies, where cacao was first encountered. They belong to Modica, in the province of Ragusa, a town whose grainy, cold-worked chocolate is another Spanish inheritance from the New World. Local tradition holds that the biscuits were devised in a convent, the nuns hiding minced meat inside sweet cocoa cases so that friars and confessors might eat meat unnoticed during the lean days of fasting. Richer game once filled them; today it is beef. Long-keeping and easy to carry, they were made to travel.

The crust is thin, short and barely sweet; the filling inside is dense and fudgy, dark with chocolate and rich with almond, sweet and warmly spiced with cinnamon and clove. The beef is undetectable as meat, sensed only as a deeper, rounder savour beneath the cocoa. A dusting of icing sugar and, sometimes, a cup of coffee complete it.

The trick is that chocolate hides meat. Cocoa is intensely bitter and aromatic, loaded with theobromine and roast-derived compounds, and together with cinnamon and clove it masks the smell and taste of the beef, whose own savour survives only as a background umami from its glutamates. Grinding the cooked beef fine and binding it with ground almonds and sugar disperses the meat and its fat evenly, so no fibre reads as meat; the almonds' oil and the cocoa butter, both solid fats, give the filling its fudgy set. Sugar and the low moisture of the baked paste pull water activity down so the meat keeps for weeks without spoiling, and the eugenol in clove and phenolics in cinnamon add mild antimicrobial and antioxidant protection. The pastry is a lard shortcrust, its fat coating the flour to keep it tender rather than tough.