In a panettone, ingredients come together to edge the simple to the splendid (Photo: Getty Images/Thinkstock)
The cobbled streets of North Italy’s Bra are narrow and winding, flanked by buildings whose Baroque facades rise like the wings of a stage set. The town is a mosaic of old Italy — medieval churches, pastel-coloured boutiques, macellerie and pasticcerie, still largely family-run. Wandering through this Piedmontese town one late winter afternoon, is when I first saw it — elevated on a plinth in the window of a bakery, its golden crust cracked and glistening. Swaddled in parchment and cinched with a ribbon, panettone was clearly meant to be admired, revered even. But the ceremonial presentation belied its modest, almost bashful appearance. An Italian friend, noticing my bemusement, said, “That’s panettone. It’s not just bread. It’s Christmas.”
Panettone’s story is a delicious tangle of folklore. The most famous tale begins in the court of Ludovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan in the late 15th century. A young kitchen assistant named Toni burned the Christmas cake meant for the Duke. Desperate, he whipped up a loaf from leftover eggs, butter and candied fruit. The Duke loved it so much, he named it pan de ton — Toni’s bread.
In another version, a poor baker’s son, Ughetto, used his own Christmas yeast to win over a wealthy baker’s daughter. This loaf became the first panettone. Over centuries, these legends have baked themselves into every crumb of the bread.
I bought a panettone, though I was sceptical. Traditionally shared with family and friends, my first bite was a solitary affair. I unwrapped it with the reverence of a ritual: the crinkle of the paper, the scent of citrus and honey rising as I tore off a piece. The texture was light, almost cloud-like, with pockets of raisins and candied orange, reflecting the old Italian instinct of taking a handful of ingredients, each pulling its weight, and coaxing them into something that edges the simple towards the splendid.
The allure of this fruity bread has found admirers across the globe. It started with the Industrial Revolution that turned wheat from a luxury grain into an everyday staple. In the early 20th century, Milanese bakers Angelo Motta and Gioacchino Alemagna took it further, pioneering the industrial mass production of panettone. Their efforts transformed a once-rare Christmas loaf into a widely loved holiday classic, though not without blunting some of its local character. It was carried across the Atlantic by Italian families during the great waves of migration from the late 19th through the early decades of the 20th century. In North and South America, it slipped into what historian Elizabeth Zanoni calls “migrant marketplaces”, the neighbourhood shops and import counters. In these pockets of diaspora life, panettone held its ground as a cherished Christmas symbol.
Today, you can find panettone in bakeries from Lima to Melbourne, each place folding its own accents into the dough —lucuma-spiked versions in Peru, mango-and-macadamia riffs in Australia, black-sesame and date-studded loaves in Dubai.
And still, for all its global variations, my favourite remains the simple version that I first tasted in Bra. What began as a sceptical first bite turned into a full-blown pursuit of the best panettone in the country.
Damini Ralleigh is a food writer and the founder of indicā, New Delhi
