cassata a speciality of Sicily, where it is a traditional Easter food, was originally a sort of cake, filled with ricotta beaten up with sugar, chocolate, vanilla, candied fruit (especially small cubes of pumpkin), and a liqueur. This filling, according to a description quoted by Carol Field (1990), is enclosed ‘in alternating squares of sponge cake and almond paste coloured green to look like the pistachio paste with which cassate were originally made. The cake is iced and decorated in a flourish of baroque extravagance with ribbons of candied pumpkin sweeping around a candied half orange set in the center, and it is dotted with glacéed cherries and sprinkled with silver sugar balls.’ The cake’s Arabic origins, in etymology as well as cookery, are discussed in Wright (1999).
