The origin of the name, as well as that of the biscuit itself, is uncertain. The mostacciolo is sometimes associated with the mustaceum, a sweet focaccia, similar to a cake, served during wedding banquets and special celebrations in ancient Rome. It was made with fine wheat flour (siligo), reduced cooked must (defrutum), honey, cheese, anise, cumin, pepper, and possibly cinnamon or spikenard, and baked on a bed of laurel leaves, whose essential oils flavoured its base. Mentioned by Juvenal as a symbol of ostentation in the imperial period, the mustaceum was distributed to guests at the end of ceremonies, when they were already satisfied, either to be consumed on the spot or taken away as a remembrance of the wedding — a kind of edible ante litteram wedding favour with an auspicious function, made possible by the long shelf life ensured by its ingredients.

Eighteenth-century pharmaceutical recipe books of the Franciscan friars use the Latin term mortariolum, translated into Italian as mostacciolo or “sweet of the dead”, to refer to the sweets so beloved by Saint Francis of Assisi that they came to be known as “Saint Francis’s mostaccioli”, still prepared today in his memory, especially on the feast of October 4. According to the Legend of the Three Companions, when the saint sensed the end of his earthly life approaching, he expressed the wish to have his friars and the Roman noblewoman Jacopa de’ Settesoli by his side, explicitly asking for the almond-and-honey sweet she used to prepare for him. The episode is also recounted in the Mirror of Perfection, which tells how the woman, guided by a spiritual inspiration, arrived just in time to offer the sweet to Francis as a final physical and emotional comfort before he was welcomed into the arms of “Sister Death”.

Mostaccioli thus stand at the intersection of devotion, ritual practice and herbal knowledge. Although they were not classified as medicines in a strict sense, their ingredients were considered powerful restoratives in medieval apothecaries, and in Franciscan settings, they provided nourishment and relief to mendicants and pilgrims. Saint Francis’s request was therefore not merely a gastronomic desire, but a search for care through a “medicinal” food capable of offering comfort to a body worn by suffering in the final moments of his passing.

A biscuit of similar composition is described by Bartolomeo Scappi, the most renowned Italian cook of the sixteenth century, who included Neapolitan mostaccioli in his monumental cookbook Opera dell’arte del cucinare (1570). He prepared them for the banquets of Pope Pius V, in whose service he worked, praising their refined use of spices and their long shelf life: “always better on the second day than on the first, and lasting a month in perfect condition”.

Although their shape and composition have partly changed over time, the function of mostaccioli appears to follow that of their likely antecedents. For centuries, they have remained “special-occasion” sweets, traditionally offered at weddings, patronal feasts, commemorations of the dead, Christmas celebrations and the turn of the year, fulfilling ceremonial, auspicious and sometimes ostentatious roles, especially in central and southern Italy, where variants are still found in which they are shaped or baked on citrus or laurel leaves.

Typical wedding and Christmas sweets, prepared for the most important festive occasions of the calendar, the mostaccioli of Castelli are rhomboid-shaped biscuits, originally based on the use of cooked must. Widespread in different variants across the province of Teramo — such as the tatù of Bisenti — the mostaccioli of Castelli are today made using a mixture of thirteen ingredients, as reported by Anna Di Simone, one of the leading custodians of the recipe. Documented through recent fieldwork by Emanuele Di Paolo and included in the Teramo cookbook compiled by the anthropologist Annunziata Taraschi, her version involves a long and careful preparation of flour, cocoa, cinnamon, lemon zest, rum, coffee, eggs, sugar, toasted and ground almonds, and vanilla, to which honey and melted chocolate are added; nutmeg is considered optional by Anna, who generally prefers not to include it. After resting for several hours, the dough is shaped into logs, slightly flattened and cut diagonally to form individual biscuits, each carefully worked by hand before baking to achieve the desired shape.