Pandoro

Pandoro is a traditional Italian sweet bread, most popular around Christmas and New Year. Typically a product of the city of Verona, pandoro traditionally has an eight-pointed shape.

It is often dusted with vanilla scented icing sugar, which is said to resemble the snowy peaks of the Alps during Christmas.

History
Pandoro appeared in remote times, the product of breadmaking, as the name, pan d'oro (lit. 'golden bread'), suggests. Throughout the Middle Ages, white bread was consumed solely by the rich, while the common people ate black bread. Sweet breads were reserved for the nobility. Bread enriched with eggs, butter, and sugar or honey as a sweetener were served in their palaces and known as royal bread or golden bread.

17th century desserts were described in the book Suor Celeste Galilei, Letters to Her Father, published by La Rosa of Turin, and included "royal bread" made from flour, sugar, butter and eggs.

The first citation of a dessert clearly identified as pandoro dates to the 18th century. The dessert certainly figured in the cuisine of the Venetian aristocracy. Venice was the principal market for spices as late as the 18th century, as well as for the sugar that by then had replaced honey in European pastries and bread made from leavened dough. It was at Verona, in Venetian territory, that the formula for making pandoro was developed and perfected, a process that required a century. The modern history of this dessert bread began there on October 30, 1894, when Domenico Melegatti obtained a patent for a procedure to be applied in producing pandoro industrially. Melegatti formed a pandoro company in 1896, which survived a bankruptcy crisis in 2017.