Baking

When Napoleon lifted up his brother-in-law Joachim Murat to the throne of Napoli in the early nineteenth century, he wittingly rubbed the gastronomic culture of the city to a high French polish. As the governor of Paris, Murat fixed for himself a popular reputation as gourmand, having conducted the business of his offices more often than not midst the ever-sumptuous, sometimes not-meant-to-be-eaten bas-relief of his banqueting tables. And trailing Murat to Napoli marched legions of French chefs. The great toques were an outlandish platoon, striding about the city’s marketplaces and food shops like so many swells among the rabble and answering only to the title monsieur. The irreverent Napoletani soon punished the word into monzù. But even without the genuflection of the masses, the French masters left rich, culinary impress. In the embrace of their hyperbole, there was nothing too spangled, their dishes mostly unredeemed paroxysms of the baroque in both component and construction. And one of their glory dishes was the timballo—the drum—recalling the high-sided round or oval forms in which the chefs built great, towering pies, as much for table architecture as for their eventual service as dinner. One version of the timballo asked for a deep mold upholstered in sweet short pastry, layered with pasta stuffed with veal sweetbreads, layered with the livers of game and whole fat, musky truffles, all of it robed in a salsa besciamella—béchamel—spiced with cinnamon and nutmeg and cloves. The timballo was roofed then in more pastry, painted with egg wash and baked golden as amber. Here follows a version less awkward to make, less fantastic, perhaps, but no less sublime for its relative restraint. When preparing any one of the cinque brasati di carne con pomodori (page 67), increase the amount so that some might be saved, then used to flavor the timballo.

A while ago, I’d heard from a friend about a tart made with oranges from the groves on the island of Capri, it, once an idyll and now mostly a tourist ruin just seventeen kilometers across the bay from Napoli. Specifically, it was the island’s village of Anacapri that was the scene of my friend’s tart story. She told me that the confection was barely sugared, so perfect were the oranges of its making. She said it was all of a cool cream in the mouth, each little bite of it a sensual, sweet/pungent explosion. She said that even the crust was scented with oranges, perhaps with some locally distilled liqueur of the fruit, and that, too, the crust gave up some soft breath of herb, like wild mint or rosemary. But where in Anacapri, I begged, never having seen the sweet in any pasticceria nor read of it on any menu nor found it perched on any dessert cart. Worse, everyone I asked about the tart shook their heads. “Non c’è una cosa del genere qui, signora.” “There is nothing of that sort here, madam.” This bantering betwixt my friend and I has endured several years. She insists that the tart, indeed, exists. I think it some citrusy half-dream of hers, a tart that should have been, perhaps, but one that never yet was, at least not in Anacapri. And so I baked it, hearing her gurglings and swoonings in my mind at every step. Though I’ve yet to make it for her—she living in Oregon while I’m here in Tuscany—I offer it here and tell you, humbly, of its goodness, of its simple sort of persuasiveness. I think it is the pastry I would make and share and eat on the last day of the world.

The town of Scanno is bedded quaintly on a valley floor near the tortuous Gole del Sagittario—a mountain road called the “Throat of Sagittarius,” on the fringes of the Parco Nazionale degli Abruzzi, a national park and nature reserve. Bespeaking eloquently its Late Renaissance and Baroque past, its little streets and alleyways are warmed by artisans working in gold and silver and lacemakers with their small wooden hoops. The women—many of them, rather than only an archaic few—toddle through the enchanted tableau of the old village on Sundays garbed in long black skirts that rustle their arrival, their hair swept up in gorgeous and ornate headdresses of lace and velvet, their arms comforted in black woolen capes. Theirs is no quaint, historic burlesque. They are wearing the clothes that please them, that are faithful to their images of themselves, that honor their heritage. They are at their ease. A poetically costumed nonna (grandmother) admonishes her young grandson—in jeans and a T-shirt, his hair falling in soft brown curls below his shoulders—to be neither late nor in a hurry for Sunday dinner before she disappears through the small, humble portal of her home. Scanno, if one watches her carefully, will give view to a life inviolate. And these are her traditional biscuits, all chewy and full of spiced Renaissance perfumes and savors, lovely with good red wine, especially when it’s warmed and spiced with pepper and cloves, or, in summer, a little goblet of sweet, iced moscato.

Beautiful breakfast biscuits with hot anisette-sparkled milk, caffè, or cioccolata calda.

First, know that you are about to bake the earth’s most delectable prune tart. If you wish to make it with fresh plums, you must sugar them, according to their own sweetness and your own need to taste sugar rather than fresh fruit. The same adjustment is necessary should you use fresh apricots or nectarines or peaches. Then simply proceed with the recipe.

Il Pane della Ninna Nanna (Lullaby Bread). Neither very sweet nor pizzalike in the flat, savory pie sort of way, this is a gold-fleshed, orange-perfumed cakelike bread that, if baked with care, will be tall and elegant, its crumb coarse yet light and full of the consoling scents of yeast and butter. Fabriziana is one of the several “middle” names of the Roman countess with whom I learned to bake the confection in the cavernous old kitchen of her villa that looks to the gardens of the Borghese. Ours were clandestine appointments, with our yeast and our candied orange peels and the tattered recipe book of her mother’s cook. You see, Fabriziana had never cooked or baked in her life, had never made anything from a pile of flour and a few crumbles of yeast. Forbidden in the kitchen as a girl, her adulthood has been always too fraught with obligations to permit interludes in front of the flames. But in the years we have been friends, she has always demonstrated more than a kind interest in my cooking, sitting once in a while, rapt as a fox, on an old wrought-iron chair in my kitchen as I dance about. And one day when I told her I was searching for a formula for an ancient, orange-perfumed Roman bread, she knew precisely where to find the recipe. Trailing off in some Proustian dream, she said she hadn’t thought of the bread in too many years, it having been her favorite sweet at Christmas and Easter. Once she even requested that it—rather than some grand, creamy torta—be her birthday cake. She told of poaching slices of it from a silver tray during parties and receptions, stuffing them deep into the pockets of her silk dresses to eat later in bed, after her sister was safely asleep, so she might share them only with her puppy. So it was that we decided to make the bread together. Wishing to avoid the chiding of her family and, most of all, her cook, we chose to do the deed on mornings when the house would be safe from them. It was wonderful to see Fabriziana at play. Flour and butter were forced under her long, mother-of-pearled nails, and her blond-streaked coif, mounted to resist tempests, soon fell into girlish ringlets over her noble brow. With a few mornings’ worth of trial, we baked Fabriziana’s lullaby bread, the bread of her memories. And once, on a birthday of mine, the countess came fairly racing through my doorway proffering a curiously wrapped parcel that gave up the telltale perfumes of our bread. The countess had learned to bake indeed.

In several of the finest of Rome’s gastronomie (prepared food shops) and rosticcerie, one finds a reading of this coarse sort of country pâté, prepared by the Romans with the prowess of French charcutiers. Sometimes, its middle will hide the Cognac-steeped livers of game, while others are studded with hazelnuts or truffles or wild mushrooms. This one, though, has become one of our “house” terrines. Some evenings, we like to make a supper of it and a good bread and wine. We have been known, more than once, to use it to build little panini, sandwiches, which we wrap in yellow napkins and hide inside my purse with a small silver flask of red wine to take with us over the mountain to Chianciano when we go to see a film. It tastes so good in the dark.

My ongoing quest to find new ways to eat butter, sugar, and nuts together resulted in this happy discovery: sbrisolona. A regional specialty of Mantova, Italy, this cookie gets its name from its crumbly texture. The dough is worked together by hand into a dry, coarse meal, pressed into a cake pan, and baked until it’s very firm. I follow the Italian tradition and break the giant cookie into rough, jagged pieces. Like biscotti, its dense, nutty quality makes it the perfect vehicle for scooping up zabaglione. This old-fashioned Italian custard is traditionally made by whisking egg yolks, sugar, and Marsala wine over simmering water. In this festive version I’ve substituted slightly sweet sparkling Moscato d’Asti for the Marsala.

In so many American childhoods, cherry pie is a gloppy, cloying, Day-Glo affair. As a chef, I’m expected to disdain such things now, and, officially, I do. But I’ve always loved cherries. This Italian cherry and almond tart is everything a bad cherry pie is not: flaky, buttery, and sophisticated, with a filling the color of darkest rubies. But if someday, when cherries are long out of season, you happen to see in a corner booth at DuPar’s Coffee Shop someone who looks like me, wolfing down a slice of all-American diner pie, wearing dark sunglasses and a stain that looks suspiciously like Red Dye #40, well, keep it to yourself. Even chefs have fond memories of their misguided youth.

Trying to come up with a new sugar cookie recipe is like trying to reinvent the wheel. Over the years I’ve tried, but, inevitably, I always come back to this one from Chez Panisse Desserts by Lindsay Shere. Sometimes I like to top the sugar cookies with a little black pepper, fennel seeds, candied ginger, or lavender sugar, but here they’re embellished with candied tangelo zest to complement the “Creamsicle.”

This cake was a collaboration of sorts between my husband and my pastry chef Roxana Jullapat (don’t ask!). I love this cake so much that, when it came time to think about my wedding cake, I wasn’t concerned with the flowers on top or the color of the icing; all I knew was that I wanted to serve this incredible hazelnut–brown butter cake. A simple recipe of ground hazelnuts, egg whites, and sugar combined with brown butter results in a moist, rich cake with a delicate, slightly chewy crust. Little did I know, it would take 25 pounds of hazelnuts, 25 pounds of brown butter, and 150 eggs to make a cake big enough to feed our 140 friends and family.

Give me almost any combination of toppings, and I’ll turn them into a delicious savory tart. The formula is always the same: the crispy, buttery puff pastry crust; a creamy base of ricotta and crème fraîche; a layer of oozing, usually pungent cheese; and then, of course, the topping. In this case, I sauté an array of winter wild mushrooms until they’re tender, chewy, and still a little crisp. Since they seem to make everything taste better, I can’t resist tossing in a few handfuls of sweet young onions with their spicy green tops. As they all bake together, their flavors unite into this decadent and sophisticated “pizza.”

The first time I had gâteau basque, I was living in the southwest of France and trying, in my little spare time, to sample as many of the local treats as possible. Gâteau basque, a very moist, buttery cake with a certain je ne sais quoi, was by far my favorite. Despite its name, it’s not really a gâteau, or cake, but rather two layers of buttery, crumbly crust filled with pastry cream. As it bakes, the crust and filling meld into one delicious whole. This rural dessert has many interpretations, with fillings that vary from almonds to raisins to fruit jams. For this version our first pastry chef, Sara Lauren, came up with a pastry cream spiked with an unusual combination of Armagnac, rum, orange-flower water, and almond extract. The cake doesn’t taste like any one of those flavorings, but together they somehow evoke that unforgettable flavor of the Basque country.

When we were opening Lucques, we had very little money for the renovation. The space had a decent kitchen but lacked a great oven. Fritz León, one of our purveyors, was hanging out with us one long day of construction and happened to mention a “huge, fantastic” deck oven that one of his other clients downtown was selling for (and this was the key) “cheap.” What more could I ask for? I bought it on the spot. I began to doubt myself when we went to pick it up and found it was so huge and heavy that we had to take it apart just to get it through the kitchen door. It was a monster, and when we finally did get it installed it seemed as if the old dinosaur had a mind of its own. Each deck ran at a specific, apparently predetermined temperature, no matter what setting we mere mortals put it at. The lower deck was at a constant 350°F, the middle at 400°F, and the top at a raging 500°F plus. It wasn’t long before the top deck was christened “the Terminator,” and now I can’t imagine life at Lucques without it. It was even instrumental in the evolution of our pain d’épice, developed by former pastry chef Kimberly Sklar. For a crispy exterior, she sliced the classic Alsatian spice bread and toasted it on the floor of the Terminator before slathering it with butter and kumquat marmalade. At home, you can simulate the “Terminator effect” in a hot cast-iron pan.

Many people associate particular years of their childhood with the television shows they watched or the sports they played. In my family, intervals of time were marked by food. The break between third and fourth grade was the summer of crêpes. My parents had just returned from a trip to Brittany, and my mother was determined to re-create the handiwork of their famous crêperies. I got on the crêpe bandwagon, too, and borrowed her Teflon-coated electric skillet on the weekends. While my sister entertained all the neighborhood kids in the pool, I set up my backyard crêpe stand and spent the afternoon flipping and filling to the sounds of “Marco . . . Polo . . . Marco. . . .” These lemon-hazelnut crêpes are a little more refined than those childhood concoctions (banana-chocolate was my specialty in those days!), but they still remind me of those joyful afternoons in my makeshift crêperie.

During my last year in high school, we were given 2 weeks off from classes for “senior projects.” While my peers pursued scuba diving, rock climbing, sailing, and photography, I headed to Ma Maison, the culinary pinnacle of Los Angeles, circa 1984. Being a girl in a French restaurant in 1984, I was led straight to the pastry kitchen. When I arrived, my fear of being in the way was quickly put to rest; the pastry chef had just been fired, and the sous-chef, Aisha, was running the show all alone. In no time at all, she had me making doughs, whipping mousses, and filling tart shells. Thrilled with my newfound pastry skills, I rushed home every day after work to re-create those desserts for my family. One of the first things I learned to make that spring was a classic lemon tart with a pâte sucrée crust. The first time I tried it at home, my chocoholic sister begged me to add some chocolate. I refused and stuck to the classic French recipe. But one day, when her birthday rolled around, I gave in to her suggestion. I melted some bittersweet chocolate, spread it over the baked crust, and waited for it to solidify. Nervously, I poured the warm lemon curd over and waited to see if it would work. It was the first time I’d ever deviated from a pastry recipe, and I was terrified I might ruin it. To Jessica’s delight (and mine, too), it was even better than the original. To this day, whenever this tart is on the Lucques menu, Jessica gloats, proud of our lemon-chocolate collaboration.

This nut tart is my dream dessert: sticky caramel poured into a buttery crust and studded with salty nuts. It’s a chewy, gooey delight, and whenever it’s on the menu at Lucques I can’t stop myself from sneaking over to the pastry station and cutting paper-thin slices to snack on. It’s also an addictive finger food, so encourage your guests to pick it up and eat it with their hands instead of struggling with a knife and fork. To turn it into a decadent, highbrow candy bar, drizzle some milk chocolate over each slice and dollop with cognac cream.

The vanilla bean is one of the wonders of the culinary world. Cured until nearly shriveled, black as a two-week-old banana, the slender pods have a sweetness that belies their appearance. The rich fragrance of true vanilla is so intense that, after my first encounter with a vanilla pot de crème in France, it seemed to permeate even my dreams. I have adapted this pot de crème recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, Simply French, by Patricia Wells and Joel Robuchon. The French-inspired chocolate sablés were developed by my pastry chef Roxana Jullapat. Encourage your guests to use them as edible spoons to scoop up the rich, silky custard.

Lucques had been open only a few months when we were asked to host an Alsatian wine dinner. Working on the menu reminded me of a road trip I had taken many years before through that northeastern region of France. With a corkscrew in the glove compartment and a stinky wheel of Muenster tucked away in the backseat, my boyfriend and I tooled around the picturesque Alsatian countryside. We lived for a few days on tall glasses of Hefeweizen—golden, unfiltered wheat beer always served with a slice of lemon—and on wedges of Flammeküche, warm, cheesy bacon-onion tarts. I made this version of that traditional tart for our wine dinner.