Pan dei morti: Milan's spiced biscuits for All Saints' week
Milan's bread of the dead is a chewy biscuit of stale crumbs, figs, cocoa and spice. Bake a tin this week for Ognissanti and Alla helgons dag.
Every year in the last days of October, the pastry shops of Milan fill their windows with flat, dark, oval biscuits under a thick snow of icing sugar. They are pan dei morti, bread of the dead, eaten for Ognissanti on 1 November and the Day of the Dead on the 2nd. My nonna made hers at home, and I still do, now in a farmhouse kitchen in the Piedmont hills.
The name sounds gloomy. The biscuit is not. It is chewy, chocolatey and full of figs, nuts and spice, closer to a soft Christmas biscuit than anything sombre. The custom behind it is tender: in Lombardy, families once believed the souls of the dead came home on the night between 1 and 2 November, so they left a bowl of soup, a glass of wine and these biscuits on the table.
It is also one of the great low-waste bakes. Pan dei morti began as a peasant recipe for stale biscuits and the dried fruit every house kept in the larder. In Sweden, Alla helgons dag falls next Saturday, 31 October, so this is the week to bake a tin.
What goes in
The base is crumbs: dry biscuits, sponge fingers and amaretti, ground fine. Flour, sugar and egg whites bind them, cocoa makes them dark, and chopped dried figs, raisins and nuts give the chew. Every family and every town does it a little differently. Some soak the raisins in Marsala, some in white wine, and in Tuscany vin santo is common. Use what you have: the end of a packet of digestives, the amaretti left over from last Christmas, the almonds at the back of the cupboard. My figs come from the old tree by the hen house, dried on racks in September.
- Biscuits: 100 g plain dry biscuits, 100 g sponge fingers (savoiardi), 50 g amaretti
- Dry: 125 g plain flour, 100 g caster sugar, 25 g cocoa powder, 1 tsp baking powder, ½ tsp ground cinnamon, a pinch of nutmeg
- Fruit and nuts: 60 g dried figs, 50 g raisins, 60 g almonds, hazelnuts or pine nuts
- Wet: 50 ml Marsala or vin santo, 3 egg whites (about 100 g)
- To finish: icing sugar, and edible wafer paper if you have it
- Makes: about 25 biscuits
How to make them
Soak the raisins in the Marsala for 30 minutes. Blitz the biscuits and amaretti to fine crumbs in a food processor, or bash them in a bag with a rolling pin. Chop the figs and nuts roughly. Mix the crumbs with the flour, sugar, cocoa, baking powder and spices, then add the figs, nuts, the raisins with their wine, and the egg whites. Work it with your hands into a firm, slightly sticky dough. If it crumbles, add a spoonful of water. If it clings to everything, add a spoonful of flour.
Wet your hands and shape walnut-sized pieces into flat ovals about 8 cm long and 1 cm thick. Lay them on a lined tray, on small pieces of wafer paper if you have it: the traditional way, and it keeps the bases soft. Bake at 180°C for about 20 minutes, until set on the outside but still soft when you press the middle. They firm up as they cool. Cool on a rack, then dust heavily with icing sugar.
Bella's tip: Bake them a day or two before you want them. Pan dei morti is better after a rest, when the figs have softened into the crumb. Keep them in a tin, not the fridge, and eat them within four days. Save the icing sugar until just before serving, or it melts into the surface.
What to pour
What to pour
- Marsala: The same bottle you soaked the raisins in. A semi-dry Marsala Superiore is nutty and lovely with figs.
- Vin santo: The Tuscan way, and the obvious choice if it went into the dough.
- Barolo Chinato: Piedmont's bittersweet, spiced wine, made from Barolo and cinchona bark. A small glass with anything chocolatey is pure pleasure.
- Barbera: Not a textbook match, I admit. But on a cold evening by the stove, with a biscuit and the last glass of the bottle, I have no complaints.
For a bigger Ognissanti table, a fruit tart sits happily beside the biscuits, and uses the last of the autumn pears.
Recipe: pear and almond tart
On the evening of the 1st I put a plate on the table, light a candle and pour a small glass for the people who taught me to cook. Then I eat a biscuit myself, because nonna never liked to see good food go to waste.
