SICILIAN BRIOCHE WITH “TUPPO”

Summer begins like this: brioscia and granita.

In truth, it never really ends, because in Sicily’s cities tourists ask for our refreshing speciality all year round. Even the French, from whom we “borrowed” it.
When I investigate the origins of brioscia, I find little of interest beyond theories that do not quite convince me. So, while waiting for an expert to enlighten me, I reconstruct my own story.

A story of cross-cultural influences, linguistic adaptations and borrowing.
The first borrowing concerns the soft, sweet dough: brioche itself, a word derived from the Norman brier, “to knead”.

In France, brioche is a small baked sweet made with flour, butter, milk and baker’s yeast.
They seem to have begun as half-spheres topped with smaller half-spheres. Later they grew larger, more structured and voluptuous, certainly in modern times with the use of strong flours.

But how did it reach Sicily and become our brioscia co tuppu?

Reading online articles reveals little firm evidence and plenty of supposition. The only historical account links it to Francesco Procopio de Coltelli, the Sicilian who brought sorbets and ice cream to Paris and founded its oldest café, Le Procope, in 1686.
The ice cream maker may have paired the local brioche with his ice creams and sorbets there, but I find no evidence that he returned to Sicily.

It seems rather unlikely to me.
I think it more likely that the sweet reached us through the Monsù, the southern Italian adaptation of the French Monsieur.

My reasoning follows both a chronological thread, the arrival of the Monsù, and a contemporary development, the spread of the term tupé.
French cooks arrived in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies after the marriage of Maria Theresa of Austria and Ferdinand I of Bourbon in 1768.

The queen wanted to introduce the refinement of French cooking to her new kingdom.
The Monsieur chefs greatly enriched our already varied cuisine and certainly taught us their traditional brioche.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the French fashion term toupet also entered Italian: literally “tuft” or “top”, later used for a hairstyle.

While Italian retained the French pronunciation, in Sicilian it became u tuppu.
A hairstyle that became almost obligatory among Sicilian women.

Told this way, the story of Sicilian brioscia, which “borrowed” everything from France, seems smoother and more plausible.

It is now part of our food heritage.

And they have the Mona Lisa.