Photo Credit: Courtesy of Iris Apfel
ITALY WAS ALWAYS a favorite. We visited Siena during Il Palio, which is held twice a year when the city’s seventeen contrade (districts) each enter a horse in the medieval race in the Piazza del Campo. There’s a lot of pageantry and celebration around the event, and each contrada has a social club that holds a banquet the night before. During our stay, I had become friendly with our inn’s majordomo, who invited me to be his guest at his contrada’s banquet.
For dessert, they served a torta della nonna (grandmother’s cake). It’s prepared however Grandma sees fit, but this one was filled with crema pasticcera (custard) and topped with pine nuts and powdered sugar. The crust was made of pasta frolla (shortbread pastry). It was so divine that I told the majordomo I wished I could get cake like that in the States.
He took me to meet the head baker, who was overjoyed that I liked his confection so much and presented me with the recipe, folded neatly into an envelope.
Later that evening, when I got back to the hotel, I opened the envelope and began to read the recipe ingredients: Four hundred eggs, sixty pounds of flour—honestly, I don’t remember the numbers exactly, but they were outrageous. I started to laugh hysterically: the recipe he had given me was for a cake that would feed the whole contrada.
If an experience was
WONDERFUL,
don’t try to re-create it.
It will never be as
BEAUTIFUL
as it was the first time.