Dish & Tell: Michele's Christmas Pandoro

Michele Pantoni shares a family holiday tradition from Rome, layered with mascarpone cream and raspberry jam.

In Rome, we have had pandoro every Christmas. As the holidays approached, the tall, star-shaped sweet breads began appearing in stores and on tables throughout the city. For me, seeing a pandoro meant Christmas wasn’t far away.
Pandoro’s roots run deep. During the Renaissance, wealthy Italian families often set their holiday tables with rich sweet breads, sometimes decorated with gold leaf. Its name means “golden bread,” a fitting description for its soft, buttery, vanilla-scented crumb and warm golden color. Unlike its famous Christmas counterpart, panettone, pandoro doesn’t contain raisins or candied fruit. Its simplicity is part of its appeal.

The dish originated in Verona, the famous setting of Romeo and Juliet, where pastry chef Domenico Melegatti patented its name, shape, and recipe in 1894. A local impressionist painter designed the eight-pointed star still used today.
One of my favorite pandoro traditions is the way we prepare it before serving it. Every pandoro comes sealed in a plastic bag, with a small packet of powdered sugar tucked in the box. You pour the sugar into the bag, close it tight and shake until every inch of the cake is coated. Pandoro needs little more than that generous dusting. Once its tall, eight-pointed shape is covered in white, it looks almost like a snow-covered Christmas tree.

In my family, though, we rarely stop at powdered sugar. Every Christmas, my cousin Emily takes charge of the pandoro. She fills it with cream and decorates it with pomegranate seeds, pistachios and a final snowfall of powdered sugar. We serve it as dessert after our big Christmas lunch, and her version has become as much a part of our holiday as the pandoro itself.

After moving from Rome to Missouri, traditions like this have taken on a new meaning. The foods I grew up with every Christmas now give me a way to share a little piece of an Italian holiday tradition with family and friends here in Jefferson City.

For CITY’s version, we built on Emily’s recipe with a few creative touches of our own. The pandoro is sliced horizontally into stars, then layered with raspberry jam and a lemon-scented mascarpone whipped cream. Each layer is rotated as it’s stacked, turning pandoro’s signature shape into a Christmas tree. Pomegranate seeds and pistachios add red and green, while powdered sugar gives it a snowy finish. And because pandoro means “golden bread,” we added edible gold flakes as a final nod to its name.

This Christmas, I’m glad to share Emily’s tradition with family and friends in Jefferson City. It’s one part of our Christmas lunch in Rome that I can bring to the table here.