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Curly Tart
(Torta ricciolina) Sweet almonds with a few bitter ones, four ounces, Granulated sugar, six ounces, Candied fruits or angelica, 2½ ounces, Butter, two ounces, Lemon peel.
Mix two eggs with flour, flatten the paste to a thin sheet on a bread board and cut into thin noodles. In a corner of the bread board make a heap of the almonds with the sugar, the candied fruit cut in pieces and the grated lemon peel. All this cut and crush so as to reduce the mixture in little pieces. Then take a pie-dish and without greasing it, spread a layer of noodles on the bottom, then pour part of the mixture, then another layer of noodles and continue until there remains no more material, trying to have the tart at least one inch thick. When it is so prepared cover with the melted butter, using a brush to apply it evenly. 189
The dish itself — a tart of fine egg noodles layered with crushed sweetened almonds — is a real Emilian sweet, but this version specifies bitter almonds, and that is not a garnish detail that can be waved through.
- Bitter almonds are the problemBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nuts are chopped, crushed and moistened — exactly what this recipe asks for. They are not sold for eating in the United States and are restricted elsewhere for this reason. There is no reliable way to judge a safe number of "a few" at home, since the glycoside content varies from nut to nut.
- Raw and unheatedNo baking instruction is printed -- The almond, sugar and candied fruit mixture is crushed cold and layered in dry. The recipe as printed stops at brushing the top with butter: it gives no oven temperature and no baking time, so the written method never tells the cook how, or how long, to cook it, or when it is done.
- The quantities do not closeEggs and flour for the noodles are given only as "two eggs with flour," with no weight, and the pan size is unstated beyond "at least one inch thick." Even setting the almonds aside, this is a sketch rather than a set of instructions.
- What to do insteadIf you want a torta ricciolina, use a current recipe. Modern versions generally use sweet almonds, with almond extract or amaretti supplying the bitter note, and they give a temperature and a time.
Torta ricciolina — "curly tart," named for the ribbons of hand-cut tagliolini that coil across its surface — belongs to Emilia-Romagna, and Bologna in particular, where it is also called torta di tagliatelle. It is a thrifty grand dessert: the same egg pasta rolled for Sunday broth, cut finer and layered with the expensive things — almonds, sugar, candied citron, angelica, lemon zest — into something that eats like a cross between a nut tart and a pastry. The bitter almonds are the period marker. Before commercial almond extract became cheap and ubiquitous, a small proportion of bitter almonds was the standard way to give marzipan, amaretti and almond fillings their characteristic scent, and nineteenth-century Italian and English cookbooks call for them without comment. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) drew on that tradition, and on the household repertoire codified by Pellegrino Artusi, whose La scienza in cucina carried a version of this tart; Artusi is generally credited with fixing many such regional sweets in print for a national audience.