Cornetto: The Italian Answer to the Croissant
The cornetto is the Italian take on the croissant: layered leavened dough rolled into a horn, with eggs and extra sugar, softer and sweeter than the French original and almost always filled - that is how Italian cuisine bakes it, up and down the country.
What Cornetto Means and Why Milan Says Brioche
Dictionaries treat the two words as synonyms, cooking sites treat them as two different things, and Italians often settle it their own way: fresh from the bakery it is a cornetto, the same thing wrapped in plastic on a shelf is a croissant. Cornetto is a diminutive of corno, horn, so the name describes the shape of the two points of a crescent moon rather than the flavor - the French croissant and the Viennese Kipferl carry the same image in their names. The cornetto is Italy's national version of a pastry the whole of Central Europe shares and that every country has given its own name: France has the croissant, Polish cuisine the rogal, Spanish cuisine the cruasán. In northern Italy, on top of that, brioche covers anything you can eat with your morning coffee, so a Milanese orders a brioche and gets what a Roman calls a cornetto (and for the record, there is a third cornetto as well, the Algida ice cream cone dreamed up in the late fifties by a Neapolitan gelato maker).
The Baker Who Died Three Years Before His Own Legend
Guidebooks tell you a Viennese baker made the crescent-shaped roll after the Turks were driven off in 1683, as a jab at the Ottoman flag. A nice story with two flaws: crescent-shaped Viennese pastry is documented as early as 1227, and the baker credited with the invention died three years before the siege. The roll reached Italy from Vienna by way of Venice, where pastry chefs added the eggs and the sugar, and all that happened long before France had ever heard of it. The Viennese roll only reached France with the Austrian entrepreneur August Zang, who opened a bakery in Paris in 1838, and the layered butter dough that defines the croissant today is a twentieth-century French reinvention. So the cornetto and the croissant are cousins out of the same Viennese cradle, not father and son. Anyone who claims otherwise usually cites Marie Antoinette, and that is another legend.
Eggs in the Dough and Everything That Fits Inside a Cornetto
The difference between a croissant and a cornetto is not in the name but in the eggs. The French croissant is butter and air at heart - dough without eggs, little sugar, layers that end up on your shirt the moment you bite in. The cornetto has eggs and more sugar in the dough, which makes it softer, denser and sweet on its own; there is usually less butter, and Italian television found some years ago that in most bars margarine takes its place. The closest thing back home is the soft, faintly sweet crescent roll the bakery sells in the morning - the kind you eat straight out of your hand. The filling turns Italian breakfast into a sport: crema is vanilla custard cream under a dusting of powdered sugar, cioccolato is usually a hazelnut-chocolate spread, marmellata tends to be apricot, and integrale is the whole wheat version, which the south fills with bitter orange marmalade. Pistachio cream was a Sicilian family affair for a long time, and only in recent years, with the Sicilian pistachio and social media, has it spread across the whole country. Sicilians point out that on the island it was never a fad.
The cornetto is eaten in the morning, standing at the counter, with a cappuccino - that is how most Italians who eat breakfast out start the day. In the north nobody sells cornetti in the afternoon, while in the south you can buy one at three in the morning: Rome has its night cornetterie, baking for the people heading home from a bar rather than off to work. You order "un cornetto alla crema", and you order it at the counter - at a table the same pastry costs a third more.
Four Cornetti From the Panificio Frau Bakery
In Villasimius in the southeast of Sardinia I kept going back to the Panificio Frau bakery, and since I couldn't pick just one (read: I wanted them all), I worked my way through most of them. The crema was airy and dusted with sugar, with a delicate vanilla cream inside. You could spot the chocolate one by the chunks of chocolate on top, and the filling tasted more like hazelnut spread than like chocolate. The integrale, made with whole wheat dough, had a surprise inside: bitter orange marmalade, which suited the wholegrain flavor better than I had expected. The pistachio one won: green cream between the layers of dough, thick and just salty enough to keep the sugar in the dough from getting lost. One cost 1.20 EUR. Italians can't agree on what the pastry is called, and in Villasimius I couldn't agree with myself on which one to have. I took all four and left the argument to them.
