Quaresimali: Florence’s Lenten Alphabet Biscuits
Every year, Ash Wednesday marks the first day of Lent in the Christian liturgical calendar. It always falls six and a half weeks before Easter, opening the Lenten season that prepares us for the Resurrection, celebrated on Easter Sunday.
As we all know, every occasion has its recipe. In Florence, during Lent, people have eaten Quaresimali for centuries!
Quaresimali are the traditional Florentine biscuits shaped like the letters of the alphabet, originally made and eaten only during Christian Lent. They are made using only simple ingredients suited to the austerity and fasting of the Lenten season: egg white, powdered sugar, hazelnut paste and cocoa powder.
The recipe involves a few very delicate steps: whipping the batter, then folding in the remaining ingredients strictly by hand so as not to lose the volume, and finally drying the biscuits before baking. It is a long, painstaking process that — sensitive even to the weather — has discouraged nearly every Florentine pastry shop from making them.
The biscuits take the shape of the letters of the alphabet: said to be a reference to Holy Scripture. Among the most common molds, in fact, are the ones for the letter A (alpha) and the letter O (omega). These little biscuits were once given to children: many young Florentines got their start spelling out their first little words with them, and had great fun doing it.
In Figline Valdarno, a small company still makes Quaresimali the old way
There is a small family-run company, Scapigliati Dolciaria S.r.l., which since 1926 has made only traditional Tuscan biscuits by hand and is the last still producing Quaresimali: the old Tuscan recipe — together with its lengthy preparation — has been handed down to this day by the Scapigliati family, generation after generation.
Today, the culture of tradition seems to be in danger, threatened by a world that appears bent on forgetting the past. This company has taken it upon itself to safeguard the testimony of our tradition’s precious flavor — a memory and a taste — so that they are not lost.
We went to visit them at the workshop, in Figline Valdarno, at Via G. di Vittorio no. 8: alongside the artisanal production, there is a small factory shop that smells of fresh biscuits, where you can find every one of the Tuscan classics, from Cantuccini with PGI almonds to Brutti e Buoni and Ricciarelli, all made without preservatives — passion, tradition and quality, with the most carefully selected ingredients.
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