Having packed up my kitchen, I’m now camping out in style in my aunt’s lovely house in Westchester. We are living in the lap of luxury amongst beautiful things and everything is perfectly well equipped. But here’s the rub: none of it is our stuff. Minus my Kitchenaid and familiar pots and pans I feel a little at sea in the kitchen. My cooking life has also been constrained by limited access to a farmer’s market (we had been spoiled in the City, where year-round farmer’s markets are a walk or subway ride away, almost every day of the week). Not to mention the shortened evenings that come of commuting (gone are the blessed days when I walked around the corner to work!). I haven’t done a smidge of baking, and I confess that I am resorting to Trader Joe’s for cans of organic beans, fire-roasted peppers and tomatoes, and other shortcuts.
But when Carla asked me to bring dessert to our monthly wine dinner last month, I leapt at the chance to try my hand at the Tortoni recipe that had appeared with Amanda Hesser’s commentary in the New York Times back in February. (note: we do these dinners to celebrate the wines in the gorgeous calendar that Carla and our friend Billy Vivos made for this year).
I think I had originally ripped the recipe out because it reminded me of a beautiful dessert that Marc Ollivier’s wife served when a group from my old company visited Domaine de la Pepiere in 2007. Madame Ollivier is really an amazing cook – once we finish our epic move and I can find my office stuff, I will have to find that notebook and look back at the whole menu from that buffet. At any rate, delicious food came out in waves, many older bottles of Marc’s gorgeous Muscadet (the Clos de Briords) had been opened, and I remember that the afternoon was drawing out. Our drivers were in a hurry to get us back on the road to Normandy and the leaders of the group were making noises about having us leave… but, wait! There was the dessert! There was some drama; I think someone had to run back to their house (which is not right there at the winery) to get the dessert from the freezer and run it over to us in a car. It was a feather-light frozen mousse, served with a raspberry sauce. I bolted back two quick plates of it on the way to the bus and have had it stuck somewhere in the back of my mind ever since. I think the French call this dessert nougat, and as you can see, these two recipes are essentially the same thing as the Tortoni recipe: a frozen dessert made from a base of whipped egg whites with hot sugar syrup whipped in, then the addition of whipped cream (the difference being that nougat seems to always incorporate some sort of dried fruit, and possibly nuts, rather than crushed cookies).
Oddly enough, Tortoni came up again before I’d had a chance to make it. My father-in-law, Marcus, was going on about this dessert, biscuit tortoni, that they had always had when he was a boy in Union City, New Jersey, and which had seemingly disappeared. Apparently you bought it from street vendors or pizza parlors, where it was served in a small paper cup. It had crushed cookies in it and I think it was flavored with rum. I sent him a link to the NYT article, but as Marcus describes it, Union City Tortoni was more of an ice cream thing than the mousse-like recipe featured in the NYT. This sort of liqueur-flavored and sculpted commercially made ice cream desserts is oh-so Italian (I have memories of being obsessed with tartufo while traveling in Italy as a teenager).
Authentic Tortoni or not, the recipe definitely had traction. Its time had come for me, not least because I could make it with a hand mixer, which I’d located in the Dobbs Ferry kitchen, avoiding a frustrating session of rooting around to unearth baking equipment, either mine (which is in a box god-knows-where), or my aunt’s, which may be squirreled away in the crowded kitchen cabinets somewhere, but which I have yet to find.
The Times recipe works like a dream, and it is really easy to make. My two notes to the recipe are this: first of all, don’t bother making your own biscuits. Given that a tube of almond paste ran me $7, and that the resulting cookies were way too much work for tasting just like the Lazzaroni Amaretti di Saronno, I’d say just go by a bag of those (or something similar) and save a step (and some money to boot). Second of all, do not underestimate how long it takes to get sugar syrup up to 230 degrees. I can tell you, it takes a while! Start by heating the syrup, and then crush your cookies and start prepping the egg whites. Also, if you have individual ramekins, it is nice to make the servings individually… although I will say that this dessert is light as a feather. So medium-sized ramekins or extra-large muffin tins would be better than, say, a standard cupcake wrapper (or you’ll just have to make two for everyone).
Also, as it stands, the recipe is something of a blank slate. I’m with Amanda Hesser’s contributor, who found no fault with the Tortoni, but added it as a garnish to his apple crisp. When I tasted a “sample” tortoni serving in the morning before the dinner (always important to test things you plan to serve to other people), I realized that on its own it didn’t make as much as an impact as I wanted: we’d need something to go with it. Although I’d consciously forgotten about Madame Ollivier’s serving method (with raspberry sauce), it must have been hovering in my mind – a simple fruit puree seemed like the way to go. In desperation, I made an on-the-fly trip to Whole Foods on the way to dinner (since the Tortoni was already safely ensconced in Carla’s freezer; I’d dropped it off early in the day) and found a small bag of organic frozen strawberries, which I simply thawed and then pureed with an immersion blender. The berries gave a nice, bright contrast to the light sweet fluffy quality of the dessert…
I also think that the texture would be improved by incorporating nuts, fruit, or other chewy things into the mousse. My next attempt will probably substitute crushed ginger snaps for the macaroons and I will fold chopped toasted pistachios and chopped crystallized ginger into the mousse before freezing… perhaps serving with a simple ginger syrup drizzled around the plate. This will no longer be technically tortoni I suppose, but perhaps I can get away with calling it “ginger biscuit nougat” or something.
And I will definitely make the plain biscuit Tortoni again come Strawberry/Rhubarb season. Strawberry rhubarb sauce would make it simply divine. Stay tuned for that recipe; if I have any time at all I will not only post it at gastronomeg.com but vow to can more jars of it this year – there can never be too many. I hoarded the last few jars and they were a treat to open in the dead of winter….
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