Updated:2024-10-09 08:13 Views:84
The martyrdom of St. Agatha is a particularly gory tale, even by biblical standards. Around A.D. 250, the young Sicilian virgin refused the advances of the pagan prefect Quintianus. In retaliationinfinity games, he imprisoned her in a brothel and later had her breasts lopped off. Though her body was healed by St. Peter, Agatha died anyway after Quintianus ordered her burned on a bed of coals, wrapped only in her red veil. As the story goes, when Mount Etna erupted a year later, the citizens of Catania retrieved that veil — which had somehow evaded the flames — to use in a procession during which it miraculously stopped the molten flow and saved the city.
In the intervening millenniums, hundreds of thousands of pilgrims have journeyed to Catania, an ancient port city on Sicily’s eastern coast, to commemorate that miracle during the Feast of St. Agatha, which takes place each February, carting around a life-size effigy of their patroness and feasting on adorable — though also, if you think about it, gruesome — little cakes known as minne di Sant’Agata. Pale and dome shaped, with glistening maraschino cherry nipples, they’re meant to resemble the saint’s disembodied breasts. Now these regional confections are having a moment in the wider world, showing up at fashionable parties and on Instagram.
The New York-based artist Laila Gohar, 36, makes a mochi version, which she has served at events for the fashion designers Olympia Le-Tan and Simone Rocha and to mark the launch of her own Gohar World wedding collection last year. Monika Varsavskaja, the 26-year-old Estonian chef behind the popular Instagram food account Cuhnja, recently gave the cakes a Frankensteinian twist, topping them with green glacé cherries. The trend might be viewed as an expression of female empowerment, at a time when women’s bodily autonomy is in peril and images of pregnant or nursing mothers are being censored on social media and removed from billboards, but the bakers themselves seem more interested in amusing audiences than in making political statements. “I think they’re quite comical, even if the history isn’t,” says Sarah Hardy, 31, of the London cake studio Hebe Konditori, who first encountered the pastries on an Italian vacation and has made a rhubarb-compote-filled dessert partly inspired by them. “There’s just something humorous about body-part-shaped cakes.”
Image
Indeed, anatomically informed pastries have existed at least as far back as ancient Greece, where, during the annual Thesmophoria festival each autumn, the goddesses Demeter and Kore were honored with honey-sweetened sesame cakes in the shape of vulvas. Legend has it that in Italy, cannoli were fashioned to look like phalluses as homage to an emir’s sexual prowess during Arab rule in Sicily. Another traditional cookie there, a mounded pistachio biscuit, is called fedde del cancelliere, or the chancellor’s buttocks. According to Mary Taylor Simeti, 83, the author of “Pomp and Sustenance” (1989), a book on Sicilian food history, the breastlike minne di Sant’Agata evolved from an earlier round-topped cake, minne di virgini. Although Simeti cites the difficulty of tracing their precise origins, the virgini were made at least as early as the 18th century in a nunnery in Palermo, where there was a tradition among aristocratic families of purchasing sweets from the convents where their unmarried daughters were confined. Bakers in Catania later came up with the idea of topping the cakes with pert candied cherries and marketing them as tributes to their city’s patron saint.
To make one typical iteration of the confection, disks of short-crust pastry are rolled out and filled with a combination of candied citron, sheep’s-milk ricotta and chocolate before being swathed in white icing-sugar glaze. Now mainstays of local pasticcerias, they’re served in Catania throughout the year, not just during their eponym’s festival.
We are having trouble retrieving the article content.
Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access.
Already a subscriber? Log in.
Want all of The Times? Subscribe.infinity games