01
Heritage
A family recipe, made in the heart of Sicily: one house, one founder, and growers who have been the same people for twenty years.
Gagliano Castelferrato · Enna
Cascina Bonfiglio
Buy fruit from growers you know by name. Cook it slowly. Add as little as the season allows.
- House
- Cascina Bonfiglio
- Place
- Gagliano Castelferrato, Enna — an hour from any coast
- Since
- 2003
- Jar
- 280 g, six preserves
The house
A Sicilian family. A family recipe.
The house stands at Gagliano Castelferrato, in the province of Enna: the inland heart of Sicily, an hour from any coast, where the hills are worked rather than admired. Rosario Sacco founded it in 2003 on a premise too plain to sound like a business plan — buy fruit from growers you know by name, cook it slowly, and add as little as the season allows.
Two decades on, the growers are largely the same people. The range has widened to more than thirty preserves and spreads; the method has not moved. Fruit arrives whole and in season, is cooked in small batches at low temperature, and reaches the jar with sugar and little else. No pectin, no colourings, no thickeners: the ingredient list on a jar of blood orange marmalade is two words long.
Where the hills are worked rather than admired.
Where the hills are worked rather than admired.
A year of fruit
Late autumn
Mandarin
The gentlest of the citrus preserves: less bitter than lemon, less sharp than blood orange. Pulp and juice at 120 grams per 100.
Deep winter
Blood orange
A season of a few weeks and a colour no other citrus produces. A jar carries both into the middle of the year.
Winter, and again in summer
Lemon
Peel and all. Leaving the peel in is what makes it a marmalade, and it is where the bitterness and the perfume both come from.
Spring
Strawberry
With less sugar in the pan the fruit stays recognisable, and the vanilla sits behind it rather than on top.
Late summer
Pear
Williams pears with a whisper of cocoa — just over one per cent — the most unexpected pairing in the range.
Autumn
Prickly pear
It grows on the hedges between fields and is a nuisance to pick, which is why so little of it leaves Sicily. Floral, mild, closer to melon than to pear.
Then the year starts again.
The craft
From the branch to the jar.
The craft
From the branch to the jar.
Picked.Whole fruit, in season, from growers the house knows by name.
Sorted.By hand, crate by crate.
Jarred.Peeled by hand, cooked at low temperature, sealed with sugar and little else.
More fruit goes into the pan than comes out of it. What leaves is water. What stays is flavour.
Why this house
Four reasons Cascina Bonfiglio enters the selection.
02
Origin
Fruit from trusted local growers across the island, bought whole and in season, and a hand that still checks every crate.
03
Craft
Fruit-forward, not sugar-forward: the fruit leads, the sugar follows, and nothing is added that the fruit did not ask for.
04
Range
Three citrus marmalades and three extra jams, all in 280 g: blood orange, lemon and mandarin; prickly pear, strawberry and vanilla, pear and cocoa.
The proof
The label does the talking.
110
grams of fruit in every 100 grams of preserve. At least: the jars run from 110 to 140.
280
grams per jar, the same for all six.
2 words
on the ingredient list of the blood orange marmalade: oranges, sugar.
Cooked at low temperature, peeled by hand. No pectin, no colourings, no thickeners: the label says everything there is to say.
The jars
Six preserves, one family.
Fruit that never has to apologise for where it comes from.
Every Cascina Bonfiglio jar is between harvests right now. Leave your email on the jar you want and we'll write the moment the next consignment lands from Enna.
Browse the whole selection
© Cascina Bonfiglio — photographs and film courtesy of the house