Neapolitan Sweet Pizza

History

Despite its name, Artusi's number 609 is a dessert: a shortcrust (pasta frolla) case filled with a milk-and-egg custard, ricotta, sugar, and pounded sweet almonds sharpened by a few bitter ones, baked, cooled, and dusted with icing sugar. The dish is genuine, not a mistake. When Artusi wrote in 1891, 'pizza' still carried its older, broader meaning of a baked cake, tart, or pie — a sense recorded across central and southern Italy long before the modern savory dish. The word itself is very old, appearing in a Latin notarial charter from Gaeta as early as 997 CE, generations before tomatoes reached Europe. Sweet, Naples-style 'pizze' were documented well before Artusi: Bartolomeo Scappi described one in 1570, and Ippolito Cavalcanti's 1837 Neapolitan manual gave a ricotta-filled 'pizza doce' close to Artusi's. The savory tomato flatbread was rising in parallel among Naples's working poor across the 18th and early 19th centuries; the celebrated 1889 tale of a pizzaiolo naming a tricolor pie for Queen Margherita is widely treated by historians as later folklore rather than settled fact.

Ingredients

• pasta frolla (shortcrust)
• g ricotta
• g sweet almonds
• g sugar
• g flour
• eggs
• lemon or vanilla
• glass milk

Instructions

1. Cook a pastry cream of milk, sugar, flour and whole egg; off heat add yolk and flavouring.
2. Blend in the ricotta and finely pounded peeled almonds.
3. Fill a pasta frolla tart (two sheets), glaze the top with egg yolk, bake, and serve cold dusted with icing sugar.