It was a chilly February morning in 2004, my first trip to Friuli after having decided to write a book on the region’s cuisine. I was exploring the town of Cividale del Friuli, and while there, I naturally had to pay a visit to the town’s most revered bakery, Pasticceria Ducale, located a short walk from the station in Piazza Alberto Picco.
The display counters were brimming with chocolate-glazed, fruit-filled, and sugar-dusted pastries, but I chose instead to buy the town’s signature dessert, gubana—a large, spiral cake filled with dried fruit, nuts, and spices. While making my purchase, I described my cookbook project to the lady at the counter and asked one of my most pressing questions: Is there any difference between the two types of gubana and the similar-looking pastries from Trieste, putizza and presnitz, or are they simply regional names for the same dessert? After giving me her explanation (which you can read about in my blog post Cividale del Friuli: Dulcis in Fundo), I made my standard request for a recipe. She then stepped into the back room and brought out a beautiful cookbook that featured their bakery’s recipe for gubana and, to my surprise, proceeded to give me the book as a gift!
Titled Dulcis in Fundo (a play on words that means literally “sweet at the bottom” and figuratively “to save the best for last”), the book is a compilation of 75 recipes from Friuli’s most prestigious bakeries. Divided into four sections corresponding to the region’s four provinces (Trieste, Gorizia, Udine, and Pordenone), the book is filled with gorgeous color photos and thorough information on the culinary history of Friuli’s desserts. One of the sections that was most interesting in my research (possibly because my dad was a college linguistics professor and some of his enthusiasm for languages may have rubbed off on me) was the chapter called “I nomi dei dolci,” which details the origins of such dessert names as gubana, putizza, and presnitz.
The book features ten bakeries from across the region. In addition to Cividale’s Pasticceria Ducale, these include Trieste’s Pasticceria Bomboniera and Pasticceria Pirona as well as Udine’s Laboratorio del Dolce. As with all my Friulian cookbooks, I referred to this one constantly throughout my recipe development process and used many of its recipes as a starting point for desserts in my book, such as gubana, strucchi, and cuguluf. For most of the Triestine desserts in Flavors of Friuli, I adapted recipes given to me by my friends at Trieste’s Pasticceria Penso. However, I really loved the large chunks of dark chocolate in the putizza at Pasticceria Bomboniera (Penso’s contains melted chocolate instead), so I was thrilled to find Bomboniera’s recipe for putizza in Dulcis in Fundo!
