Amalfi coast | Neapolitan sfogliatella

The origin of sfogliatella | Amalfi coast

We are on the Amalfi Coast, in the 1600s, in the monastery of Santa Rosa, inhabited by cloistered nuns who, by definition, had to be busy avoiding contact with the outside world as much as possible. For this reason, they farmed the land, cooked bread and invented recipes, even if the menus were usually always very similar.

One day, however, something happened that was the spark for a change in the history of the monastery, the coast and all of Naples; just the spark that created the right conditions for the birth of a new Neapolitan symbol. On that day one of the nuns, named Clotilde, noticed some remains of semolina soaked in milk. So, she made an instinctive culinary decision: she mixed it with ricotta cheese, dried fruit and lemon liqueur and prepared a pastry and closed it with two leaves to resemble the shape of a monk's cap: the santarosa was born. In fact, the dessert was not only successful among the other sisters, but began to be offered to the people, in exchange for some coins for which it was necessary to give them a name and chose that of the convent where it was created.

The Sfogliatella was born

To reach Naples, however, this delicacy took almost 200 years. In 1818, Pasquale Pintauro came into contact with this delicacy and it literally shocked him. He therefore decided to revise the recipe by converting his tavern in Via Toledo into a pastry shop and becoming a pastry chef himself.

In the version revised by Pintauro, he removed the cream and sour cherries from the filling and made the pastry thinner, so that he lost his reputation as a monk's cap: thus the sfogliatella was born!