Get Amazon Reviews for Your Cassata Siciliana Cozy Mystery

The cassata siciliana's origins trace to the Arab period of Sicilian rule, when the combination of sweetened sheep's milk ricotta with fried pastry was already a Sicilian confectionery tradition. The Norman conquest added marzipan. The Spanish added candied fruit from the Americas. The Baroque period added the elaborate decorative style. The cassata is literally a layered history of Sicily's conquests — each layer added by a different ruling culture, the whole greater than any of its parts.

A cozy mystery in which each layer of the cassata corresponds to a document, a claim, or a family secret gives the pastry an archaeological dimension that readers of culinary cozy mysteries will find irresistible.

The elaborately decorated cassata was traditionally made by nuns in Palermo's convents for Easter — specifically the Monday after Palm Sunday, known as cassata Monday. The convent versions were so elaborate and so celebrated that in 1575 the Bishop of Mazara del Vallo had to issue an official prohibition against the nuns spending so much time making cassata during Holy Week that they neglected their spiritual duties.

A cozy mystery in which a convent archive contains evidence of the original cassata recipe — and in which someone has been systematically removing pages from the archive — has a location, a timeline, and a motive that gives the amateur sleuth somewhere specific to investigate.

The decorative candied fruit on a traditional cassata siciliana is not merely decoration. Each fruit corresponds to a Sicilian agricultural tradition: the citron from the Conca d'Oro, the mandarin from the Palermo plain, the fig from the interior. When the Palermo family's matriarch dies and her prized cassata is found to contain candied fruit from Turkish suppliers rather than Sicilian ones — a substitution that has been going on for years while the family sold the cassata as authentically Sicilian — the food fraud is also an identity fraud.

The amateur sleuth who discovers it is uncovering something the family has been hiding for decades.