Crostata: The Italian Lattice Tart
A slice of tart in a brown paper box, apricot jam under a lattice of pastry, a dusting of sugar over the top. That is what a crostata looks like when you buy it by weight somewhere in Sardinia: one piece straight into your hand, and sweetness from the very first bite.
Crostata is a tart made of crumbly pasta frolla pastry, with a layer of jam or custard and a lattice of strips of the same dough on top - the most homemade dessert in all of Italian cooking. It's a Sunday tart, not a celebration cake.
Why Crostata Is Named After the Crust and Who Its Relatives Are
In Italian, crosta means crust and the Latin crustare means to cover with a crust. Crostata is therefore named after the part most people leave on the plate. And the name is older than the jam beneath it: the earliest Italian record of the word, in the medieval story collection Novellino, describes a savory dish of meat or fish baked under a crust. The sweet crostata had to wait a couple of centuries for its name.
Crostata is the Italian name for a tart that half of Europe knows. The construction - shortcrust pastry, filling, lattice - is shared; what is national is the jam under that smooth lattice and how naturally Italians reach for it. Its closest relative comes from Austrian cuisine: the Linzer Torte, except that the dough is brown, full of nuts and cinnamon, and the apricots give way to redcurrants; the French tarte usually skips the lattice and lays the fruit or the custard straight onto the pastry; the British jam tart is the same thing in miniature. And closer to home, crostata has a relative that is related by the lattice alone: the Neapolitan pastiera puts cooked wheat with ricotta underneath and bakes it from a different dough.
Who Baked the First Crostata
Type the origin of crostata into a search engine and you get the year 1380 and a cook to the French king. Except that in his book he was writing about the French tarte, and it was blogs that turned it into the Italian crostata by mixing the two words up. The sweet crostata appears under its own name only in 15th-century Italian recipe books, first with Maestro Martino, and a hundred years later Bartolomeo Scappi gives it a whole chapter - savory versions with artichokes and peas included. The oldest written recipe for a lattice tart of any kind, on the other hand, dates from 1653 and is Austrian: the Linzer Torte, discovered in a monastery archive only twenty years ago. None of this tells us who first laid strips of pastry over jam. The history of tarts was written in kitchens where nobody wrote anything down.
What Goes into Pasta Frolla and When Crostata Is Eaten
Pasta frolla is four ingredients, flour, butter, sugar and eggs, but the ratio is shameless: plenty of fat and sugar, not much of anything else. That is why the pastry crumbles once it is baked. The lattice is a technique: it lets the steam out of the jam, it shows what is inside, and it keeps the ratio of pastry to filling that makes a crostata a crostata. The filling depends on the region and on what's in the pantry: apricot, sour cherry, fig, sweetened ricotta in Sicily, and in the Roman ghetto ricotta with sour cherries hidden under a second sheet of pastry.
Crostata belongs to breakfast and to the afternoon coffee; no Italian expects it after dinner. At home it's baked on Sunday and eaten all week, in a bar it is served with coffee, and in a bakery by weight, piece by piece off the tray. Even Mulino Bianco knew this was a family tart: in 1977 it launched a packaged crostatina with a TV jingle that caught on faster than any recipe. In a bakery, have your crostata cut and weighed: a kilo is for a family, two hundred grams for one person, and anyone who isn't big on sweet things should ask for the ricotta one. The classic jam version is for people who can never get enough sweetness.
A Slice from a Paper Box in Sardinia
I bought my crostata in Sardinia, in a shop whose name I don't remember; all I have is a photo and the price. The pastry crumbled the way it should, the jam was thick and apricot, and the butter underneath only came through once the sweetness let up. A kilo cost 10 EUR, a single slice to eat on the spot 2 EUR. If you like sweet things, you'll be happy. Next time I'll have them cut me a slightly smaller piece.
