Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (74 page)

Prepare some iron or tin-plated copper pans, greased with lard and dusted with flour. Make the pastry rings any size you like, and arrange them in the pans, but make sure that they’re not too close together. Let them rise in the kitchen or any other warm place, and when they are thoroughly puffed up, make long incisions on the top of each one with the tip of a knife. Gild with egg and sprinkle with coarsely ground crystal sugar.

Bake in the oven at a moderate temperature.

In the wintertime, it would be wise to mix the leaven with lukewarm milk and then let the cakes rise in a warming oven. Using half the ingredients, you should be able to make four nice ring cakes weighing about 350 grams each, unless you prefer to make them smaller.

These family-style ring cakes are easier to make than the ones in the preceding recipe.

500 grams (about 1 pound) of Hungarian flour

180 grams (about 6-1/3 ounces) of sugar

90 grams (about 3 ounces) of butter

15 grams (about 1/2 an ounce) of cream of tartar

5 grams (about 1/5 of an ounce) of baking soda

2 eggs

lemon zest or aniseed or small pieces of candied citron

Melt the butter and pour it, along with the eggs and the sugar, into a hole that you’ve made in the mound of flour. Blend the flour with these ingredients and enough milk to give the dough the right consistency, and then knead thoroughly. Lastly, add the cream of tartar, baking soda, and lemon zest or other flavoring.

Instead of making a single cake, you can make two; make the hole larger, because they’ll come out quite thick. Make a few incisions on the surface, gild with egg yolk, grease the pan with butter or lard, and bake in the oven or in a Dutch oven. Even with half of the ingredients, you can make a fair-sized ring cake.

130 grams (about 4-1/2 ounces) of sugar

80 grams (about 2-2/3 ounces) of fine flour

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of butter

4 egg yolks

3 egg whites

a pinch of baking soda

lemon zest

First mix the egg yolks with the sugar, and when they have become whitish, add the flour and work the mixture for another quarter of an hour. Add the butter (melted if it’s wintertime) to the mixture, and lastly the egg whites, beaten.

Dry the flour on the fire, or in the sun if it’s summertime.

You can give these pastries many different shapes, as long as they are thin and small. Many people use small pastry molds greased with butter and floured, or else a baking pan a little less than a finger deep, and cut the pastry into lozenge shapes and then sprinkle it with confectioners’ sugar. You can also make it half a finger deep and stick the lozenge-shaped pieces of pastry together two by two with fruit preserves.

Use half the ingredients in recipe 589 A to make a shortcrust pastry or short pastry dough, or use the full amounts in recipe B.

150 grams (about 5-1/4 ounces) of ricotta cheese

70 grams (about 2-1/3 ounces) of sweet almonds and three bitter almonds

50 grams (about 1-2/3 ounces) of sugar

20 grams (about 2/3 of an ounce) of flour

1egg and one egg yolk

a dash of lemon zest or vanilla

half a glass of milk

Make a custard with the milk, sugar, flour, and the whole egg, and when it’s ready and still boiling, add the egg yolk and lemon zest or vanilla. Then add the ricotta and the almonds, blanched and finely ground. Blend it all together and then use this mixture to fill the shortcrust pastry as you would a cake, that is, between two layers, decorated on top and gilded with egg yolk. It goes without saying that it should be baked in the oven and served cold, sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar.

In my opinion, this makes a delicious-tasting dessert.

Use the following mixture as you would a custard, as a filling for the dough:

a quarter of a liter (about 1 cup) of milk

60 grams (about 2 ounces) of sugar

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of starch
¹⁰⁷

2egg yolks

any flavoring you like

When you remove the mixture from the fire, add:

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of whole pine nuts

80 grams (about 2-2/3 ounces) of raisins

Use this mixture to fill a shortcrust pastry crust as you did for Neapolitan-Style Sweet Pizza, and bake as in the preceding recipe.

5 eggs

sugar and flour, equal in weight to the eggs with their shells

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of raisins

200 grams (about 7 ounces) of butter

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of candied fruit, in small pieces

a teaspoon of baking soda

First blend the eggs with the sugar, add the flour and continue to work the mixture with a wooden spoon for about half an hour. Let sit for an hour or two, and then add the butter (melted over a
bain-marie
), baking soda, raisins, and candied fruit. Pour into a baking pan or smooth mold greased with butter and dusted with confectioners’ sugar mixed with flour. Bake in the oven.

Wash the raisins beforehand to clean them of the grit that they usually contain, and then dry them.

Now is a good time to say a few words about the proverbial indolence of Italians, who usually turn to foreign countries for things they have right in their own back yard. In Lower Romagna they grow a tiny, seedless red grape, which they call
uva romanina
. I have sometimes used this grape in my home, because when it’s dried you can’t tell it from ordinary raisins except that it’s of better quality and free from any grit. To dry the grapes, spread them out on a rack, keep them in a warming oven for seven or eight days, and after they’ve dried, remove the stems.

This sweet is made the same way as the last one, except you substitute lemon zest for the candied fruit and 100 grams (about 3-1/2
ounces) of sweet almonds with a few bitter almonds for the raisins. If you also use baking soda, it will turn out lighter. After blanching the almonds, dry them in the sun or on the fire. Crush very fine with two tablespoons of the sugar from the recipe, and mix with the flour before tossing into the mixture. If you don’t do this, the almonds might all stick together. The dough in this recipe needs to be worked a great deal, both before and after you add the butter. Through experimentation, my cook has found that it helps to keep the mixing bowl immersed in warm water while you’re working the dough; this also holds true for other similar kinds of dough. If made carefully, this will be deemed a delicious sweet.

3 eggs

sugar equal in weight to the eggs

125 grams (about 4-1/2 ounces) of potato flour

125 grams (about 4-1/2 ounces) of butter

125 grams (about 4-1/2 ounces) of sweet almonds, with 3 bitter almonds

lemon zest

Blanch the almonds, dry them in the sun or on the fire, and crush very fine in a mortar with a third of the sugar. Using a wooden spoon, blend the three egg yolks with the remaining sugar and the lemon zest until they have become whitish. Then add the potato flour, crushed almonds, and butter (melted), as you continue to work the mixture. Lastly, add the egg whites, beaten, and when all of the ingredients are well blended, bake in a Dutch oven. When it has cooled, sprinkle the cake with confectioners’ sugar.

If you use a baking pan with a diameter of about” centimeters (about 8-2/3 inches), the cake will turn out just the right height. You can use some of the butter to grease the pan, which, as you know, should be dusted with confectioners’ sugar mixed with flour. This is a delicate-tasting cake that serves eight people.

The word “offella,” in this context, comes from the dialect of Romagna, and, if I’m not mistaken, it is used in the Lombard dialect as well. It probably derives from the ancient word
offa
, which means a flat cake or bread made with spelt
¹⁰⁸
and various other ingredients.

Dar I’offa al cerbero, “
to give Cerberus
¹⁰⁹
a sop,” is a rather timely expression, since there are so many people these days who seek out public office so that they can gorge themselves on public funds. But we’d better get back to offelle.

500 grams (about 1 pound) of red apples

125 grams (about 4-1/2 ounces) of powdered sugar

30 grams (about 1 ounce) of candied fruit

two teaspoons cinnamon powder

Cut the apples into four sections, peel, and core. Slice the sections as thin as possible and put in a saucepan on the fire with two glasses of water; break apart with a wooden spoon. Since these apples have firm flesh, they need to be cooked in water; if they start to dry out while you’re cooking them, just add some more water. Wait until the apples have become mushy before adding the sugar, and then taste to see if they’re sweet enough, since fruit in general can be more or less acid, depending upon how ripe it is. Lastly, add the candied fruit, chopped into small pieces, and the cinnamon.

Use the shortcrust pastry dough from recipe 589 A. Spread it out with a rolling pin until it’s the thickness of a coin. Then cut it with a round pastry cutter with a scalloped edge like the one indicated on the following page. With one disk of dough underneath and one on top (the latter rolled with a ridged rolling pin), put the cooked apple mixture in the middle and moisten the edges so that the two disks of dough stick together. Gild with egg yolk, and bake. Afterward, sprinkle with confectioners’ sugar.

Image not available

Use the same shortcrust pastry dough as in the last recipe, but for the filling use the marzipan described in recipe 579 instead of a fruit mixture. If you don’t have any candied orange, use fresh orange peel, which is very pleasant. You can give these pastries a different shape to distinguish them from the ones in the preceding recipe. I use the pastry cutter indicated below, and then fold the pastry in two to form a scalloped half moon.

Image not available

By crostate I mean tarts made with shortcrust pastry dough, filled with fruit preserves or pastry cream.

Use recipe 589 B, or half the amounts in recipe 589 A. In either case, use one whole egg and one yolk, as indicated. But before adding the eggs to the dough, beat them, setting a little aside to use later when you gild the top of the tart. It’s a good idea to use some flavoring for this kind of pastry dough, such as lemon zest or orange-flower water. The best would be just to use recipe 589 C.

Using a smooth rolling pin, roll out half the dough into a round sheet the thickness of a coin, and put it into a baking pan greased with butter. Spread the fruit preserves or pastry cream (or even both, as long as you keep them separate) over the sheet of dough. If the fruit is too firm, soften it over the flame with a tablespoon of water. Now roll out another sheet of dough with a ridged rolling pin. Cut into strips just under a finger wide, and lay them over the fruit, crisscrossed, with the same distance between the strips so that they form a lattice. Then cover the ends of the strips of dough with the remaining dough, forming an edge all around the tart; moisten the dough first with water so that it will stick better. Gild the top of the tart with the egg you set aside earlier, and bake in the oven or Dutch oven. It gets better after a day or two.