Sporcamuss

A 20th-century specialty of Bari's pastry shops. Accounts of its birth differ: it is often said to have appeared between the 1950s and 1960s, served hot on feast days, while Felice Giovine, founder of the Bari studies centre, dates the first sightings to around the 1970s at the restaurant Al Sorso Preferito, then newly run by Enzo Francavilla, the cook also linked to spaghetti all'assassina. The exact origin is therefore not settled. What is agreed is the irreverent dialect name and the form, two layers of puff pastry, hot cream, a heavy veil of icing sugar, which spread from Bari across Apulia.

Messy on purpose. The puff pastry shatters in flaky, buttery shards; the cream beneath is warm, loose and vanilla-scented; and the cloud of powdered sugar on top dissolves on the lips and lands all over you. Sweet and rich, it is meant to be eaten in two or three bites with coffee, never tidily.

It rests on lamination and timing. Puff pastry, its butter folded into many thin layers, steams in a hot oven so the sheets lift and crisp into a dry, brittle shell that can hold a wet filling without going soggy. Squares are baked separately, then filled at the last moment with pastry cream cooked thick on the stove, so the layers stay crisp against the warm custard. The icing sugar goes on at serving, not before, since on a warm pastry it would otherwise melt and dull instead of staying a loose, powdery drift.