The journey into the Tuscan culinary tradition could only conclude with a taste of the sweets of the Sienese pastry tradition. The whole region, in fact, is famous for its dry cookies, holiday cakes and sweets, in an incredible variety of offerings that change according to the city of reference: from the "Buccellato" of Lucca to the "torta coi bischeri" of Pisa, from the castagnaccio spread throughout the Tuscany at "befanini" of Viareggio, all the way to the "schiacciata fiorentina", just to name a few.
Siena has always been a land of great bakers, pastry chefs and bread makers and many are its native desserts, including the Ricciarelli, Panforte, Cavallucci, Panpepato. and the Copate.
And, although in a couple of cases the authorship of these confectionery delicacies is contested with other cities, it is also true that everyone knows that many of Siena's pastry recipes belong to the distant past, dating in some cases as far back as the 1200s, as in the case of the panforte, typical Christmas dessert and gastronomic symbol of the city.
If the cantucci boast a more pronounced popularity, perhaps few are familiar with copatas, dry sweets made up of two overlapping wafers or wafers that hold a filling of honey, sugar and toasted almonds.
The origin of this cake is uncertain, as is its name. The term "copata," in fact, is said to derive from the Latin "copatus" which means "coupled", precisely indicating the dough enclosed between the two wafers, but it is more likely that the etymology comes from the Arabic "qubbaita", which means "sweet almond", which would lead back to their much older origin.
It would, in fact, be of Arab origin, at the time of the first Saracens, who in 831 conquered Palermo, where there is still a related dessert called the Cubbaita, a very primordial form of today's nougat.
Some people derive the Copata or Cubaita word from the term "coppare," meaning to cut out through a cup, to designate the act of cutting out dough with pasta cup round.
The Copates were born at the hands of the nuns of Montecelso. It was they, in fact, who upon hearing the news that the nuns of the Convent of San Baronto in Lamporecchio, produced wafers made softer and more pleasant with the addition of honey, they decided to emulate them, making a substantial change: the wafers were coupled and held together precisely by a thin layer of honey.
The idea came from the abbess of the nuns, and at first the sweets were called "nebulae" And they became the sweets of the holidays.
It was, then, an Olivetan monk who mixed together sugar and honey, roasted and ground walnut kernels, or perhaps almonds, to create a new and tasty filling, which, in the 1700s was also enriched with cocoa, giving rise to "black copatas."
Handed down from the convents, the recipes of these honey and walnut pucks, in the different versions that have come down to us, have become a very sweet way of remembering the city of Siena, with all its stories, legends, battles, intrigues and beauties...just call it "poetry to savor."
