Cornetto Crema e Amarena

Amarena is a small, dark sour cherry tied to Bologna and Modena, in Emilia-Romagna. The name comes from amaro, bitter, which is fair warning: raw, the fruit is sharp. So it is cooked gently and kept in thick sugar syrup, and that is how it reaches pastry, nearly black and sticky, sweet on the outside and still tart at the core.

In Italian pastry it works as a finishing note more than a main event. You find it spooned over gelato, folded into biscotti, set on top of tarts.

Do not confuse it with the bright red maraschino cherry of American sundaes. Amarene are darker, softer and more sour, and the syrup they sit in tastes of the fruit.

Vanilla pastry cream on its own is round and gentle. It needs an edge, and the Amarena supplies one: a sour hit and a darker kind of sweetness, with a trace of bitterness at the end.

Ask for a filled cornetto at an Italian bar and the choice is usually short: plain, cream, jam, chocolate. Crema is the classic. Ours puts the cherry in with the cream, so every bite has both rather than making you choose. The cherry on top is the first thing you taste, and it tells you what is waiting in the middle.

The same cherry runs across our counter. The Pasticciotto Crema e Amarena does the cream-and-cherry pairing in shortcrust, a firmer, more buttery bite from Puglia. The Biscotto Amarena e Cioccolato among our Italian cookies sets it beside chocolate. If you are choosing between this and our other filled cornetto, the Cornetto al Pistacchio trades the fruit for Bronte pistachio cream. Set the cornetto beside the pasticciotto and you see how much a dough changes a filling: the same cream and cherry taste lighter in one and richer in the other.

How a cornetto fits into an Italian morning, coffee and all, is the subject of what Italians eat for breakfast.