Delizia al Limone: The Lemon Dessert of Sorrento and Amalfi
Twenty-four kilometers. That is the length of the coast road from Sorrento to Amalfi, and since you spend more time turning than driving, the trip can take an hour and a half. That is time enough for two different lemons, three rival claims to limoncello and one dessert that was born on one side of the mountains and made its name on the other.
Delizia al limone belongs to Campanian cooking and is made of two sponge domes sandwiched with lemon cream, soaked in limoncello syrup and coated in a thick lemon glaze - you eat it cold, with a spoon, and the glaze is not a sugar crust but one more layer of cream.
Why the Delizia Is Not Called a Sigh
Delizia means delight or treat, and Italian pastry shops give the name to just about any small filled cake, chocolate or hazelnut ones included. The lemon one nearly went by a different name: according to the family legend of the Antico Francischiello Restaurant in Sorrento, the pastry chef and his brother spent a week torn between sospiro al limone, a lemon sigh, and delizia al limone, until the owner, don Peppino Gargiulo, settled it after the first spoonful: this is no sigh, this is a delizia. It was born in Sorrento, and today the entire coast of Campania claims it - the Sorrento peninsula, the Amalfi Coast and Naples, where travel websites like to pass it off as an old Neapolitan tradition. The rest of Italy sells it as an import from the south.
Who Invented the Delizia in Sorrento and What He Soaked It in Before
No "since time immemorial" here: the dessert has an author, a name and a year. The Sorrento pastry chef Carmine Marzuillo presented it in 1978 at the national chefs' convention in Formia and came away with a medal, even though he was not officially competing. Until then he had been soaking the sponge in Strega; limoncello was still more of a homemade liqueur back then, only just starting to be sold on the peninsula, and Marzuillo tried it in the syrup out of curiosity. One Neapolitan daily therefore argues that it was the dessert that got limoncello going, not the other way around. His brother Alfonso, head chef at Francischiello, put the delizia on the menu, and through the 1980s the restaurant's guests carried it around the whole peninsula; in 1996 the Academy of Italian Pastry Masters recognized it as a symbol of the coast. The accounts differ on the year and on the medal - in one of his last interviews Marzuillo himself talked about the early seventies and about silver - and the handwritten recipe is said to be kept by the Gargiulo family to this day. Marzuillo died at eighty-nine as a Knight of the Italian Republic, which is a decent career for the inventor of one little cake.
What the Lemon Dome Is Made of and How You Eat It
The lead role belongs to the lemon, and on this coast two of them are up for the part at once. Sorrento has the oval ovale di Sorrento with thick, aromatic peel, Amalfi the long, pointed sfusato amalfitano with less acidic juice, and every pastry shop reaches for its own; both varieties were given IGP protection more than twenty years after the dessert appeared, so Marzuillo simply worked with lemons from the garden. Peel and juice go into the cream, into the syrup that soaks the sponge and into the glaze, which is really a thinner version of that same cream - that is why the dome shines and gives way under the spoon instead of cracking. Sponge soaked in syrup is familiar to anyone who has ever bought one of those rum-soaked punch slices at a bakery back home; here limoncello and the color of butter take the place of the rum and the red icing. On top goes a spoonful of whipped cream, candied peel, sometimes a wild strawberry or a square of chocolate.
The delizia is eaten at the end of lunch or with an afternoon espresso, always chilled, in a pastry shop as a single small dome, for celebrations as a whole cake to slice. You can spot a fresh one by the glaze: it should be smooth and glossy, not dried out or cracked, with the sponge underneath soaked but never soggy. Anyone who wants the same flavor in Sorrento and in Amalfi gets a small lesson in pomology: a different lemon, a different delizia.
A Dessert on the Piazza Duomo in Amalfi
I ate my delizia in Amalfi, at the Pansa pastry shop on the square below the cathedral steps. The fifth generation of the family is at work here, and the view from the little table over the old houses around comes with the bill: the dessert cost 6 EUR, the coffee 3 EUR. The cake was cold and moist, the sponge only let go of its limoncello on the second bite, the cream was sharper than I'd expected under a white glaze, and I saved the square of chocolate stamped Pansa 1830 Amalfi for last - the pastry shop has every right to that date, but the dessert under it is almost a hundred and fifty years younger. Amalfi itself was rather a letdown: far too many people packed onto a small stretch of coast at once. For 9 EUR we boarded the fast boat to Positano - it really does go fast, and the waves decide whether you get a thrill or a test of your stomach; if you'd rather not find out, take the slower boat.
