Christmas Panetón: It Ain’t Fruitcake!

Merry Christmas! ¡Feliz Navidad!

“What are your Christmas customs?” Hot chocolate? Eggnog and brandy? Candle light service at church? Religious or not, Christmas is a season thick with the formation of culture, even if it’s the vague ideal that home is a sacred—and at times desecrated—space.

It was a question I asked my students many years ago while teaching English as a foreign language in Trujillo, Peru. It’s one of the things you do in language education as a form of cultural exchange. My students replied in unison: “panetón!” 

Pana—what?! I’d never heard this mysterious word in my Spanish studies. Sounding it out, it sounded like the Spanish word for “big bread.” I later found that it wasn’t Spanish at all, though I wasn’t far off on the meaning. Pannetone roughly translates to “large cake” in Italian. 

My students tried their best to describe it to me, but the more I heard, the more my brain translated panetón to fruitcake. Sweet bread with dried fruits? Raisin, lemon, citron? Given out around Christmas? Yep, that’s fruitcake. And fruitcake is infamous for its undesirability; it’s something you regift to a homebound relative with a taste for nostalgia. Needless to say, I was not looking forward to a Christmas panetón. It hardly seemed like a custom worthy of the wonder of Christmas.

At the beginning of December, boxes of panetón start to show up in the markets and on the streets of Peru. To say that it is a cultural phenomenon would be an understatement. Let’s just say I’ve never seen cake that came with dancing mascots before. In a land rich in agriculture and culinary art, it’s one of the few imported foods I encountered. I soon realized how wrong my initial impressions had been.

The advent of panetón is highly anticipated. They are often displayed in giant pyramids stacked to the ceiling when they arrive. They come in glossy boxes instead of the thin butcher paper you might ordinarily find wrapped around a pastry. The shape itself is less brick-shaped and more muffin; almost evoking the shape of a medieval crown. There are two major brands, both Italian, that compete in customer loyalty. Every family is either a died in the wool D’onofrio or Motta fanatic. There is often a picture on the outside of the box and you can tell from looking at it—this is almost the opposite of fruitcake. It’s light and fluffy with bits of fruit suspended throughout. Open the box and you smell the fragrant aroma of spice and a hint of sourdough funk.

I have to admit that upon eating my first panetón I was more relieved than overjoyed. I was glad it wasn’t fruitcake, but to my American palate, it was too sweet to be bread and not sweet enough to be cake. Why bother with this middle road? 

Yet as Christmas drew near, my desk started to fill up with the trapezoidal-shaped boxes of panetón. They were accompanied by generous and excited smiles from my students and friends who were brimming with delight to offer me my first panetón. I came to realize the “gift of the maggi-esque” nature of the panetón. These were not inexpensive daily breads, but special, even decadent treats that likely came at great cost to my students. Many had likely given me a  panetón they had received from elsewhere because they would rather initiate me into the custom than enjoy it themselves. Not unlike a fruitcake, I suspect that each panetón I received had passed through many hands before it came into mine. It was up to me to either end or continue its journey in a kind of Christmas game of hot potato. While the panetón was tasty, the custom lie more in the sharing than the bread itself.

That’s how I came to love panetón. 

When I travelled back to the States that year for Christmas, I packed four boxes into my borrowed suitcase, eager to proselytize to the intrigue and delight of panetón. I was a bit disappointed when my mom pointed them out to me on the shelves at her local CVS. “Yeah, but that’s not D’onofrio, mom. It’s not the same.” It couldn’t be the same, could it? Could panetón have been hiding right under my nose all these years here in America? I became further disappointed each time I introduced a neophyte to the sweet bread and watched them read the description, raise an eyebrow, and utter, “oh, fruitcake.” 

“It’s not fruitcake!” I would exclaim, pointing to the picture of fluffy, eggy goodness illustrated on the box. “Think brioche with dried fruit!” 

“But brioche is bread. I thought you said this was cake?” 

Sigh.

My missions mostly failed. Try as you might, there are some things that won’t translate. Maybe the boxes got roughed up in transit. Maybe I didn’t bring the enthusiastic disposition with me. Maybe they needed to see the dancing mascots. Or maybe my recipients had eaten too many Christmas cookies at that point in the season to appreciate a “sweetened bread.” 

Ever since, however, I buy panetón to eat on Christmas Eve and share with others. Now that I have children, we light candles on the top and sing Happy Birthday to Jesus. Most Christmas mornings we tear up the day old bread, mix it with cream and eggs and bake the best French toast casserole you’ve ever had. Like the panetón itself, I carry this tradition on wherever I go. 

How do you celebrate something as mysterious and wonderful as the God of the universe taking on the flesh of humanity in an epic mission to redeem the cosmos? How do you celebrate the first Advent of Christ while deeply longing for the second? No mere custom can truly appreciate the wonder of Christmas. Only worship will suffice for that.

But perhaps a custom can communicate something of the longing of Advent and the joy of Christmas. Perhaps something a little too sweet to be bread and not sweet enough to be cake? Perhaps something made by taking things God has created—eggs, wheat, yeast, milk, fruit—and cultivating them into a fluffy crown-shaped loaf? I think it’s a Christmas custom fit for a king. And I hope you enjoy it too.

No, D’onofrio. It’s not fruitcake.