Sweets and Desserts

Chestnuts combine perfectly with chocolate, cinnamon, cream, rum, vanilla, and orange. Maltese chestnut tartlets, pastizotti tal-qastan, are flavored with marmalade, orange, tangerine, or lemon rind, rum, and chocolate—only one teaspoon of sugar is needed to sweeten the filling. Christmas breakfast in Malta consists of chestnut soup, imbuljuta, eaten after midnight mass. It is made with dried chestnuts, cocoa, sugar, and tangerine peel cooked with the chestnut soaking water.

In Corsica the chestnut was once an essential part of life, dried in the upper stories of the house by the smoke of the open chimney (fucone) and ground into flour to make a variety of sweet dishes. Nicci were little cakes cooked on chestnut leaves. At weddings, guests enjoyed up to 22 different chestnut desserts, flavored with wild fennel, walnuts, vanilla, honey, rum, eau-de-vie, or curd cheese.