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Farina Tart
(Torta di semolino) Milk, one quart.
Farina finely ground, four and a half ounces.
Sugar, four and a half ounces.
Sweet almonds with three bitter, three and a half ounces.
Butter, a small piece.
Four eggs.
Taste of lemon peel.
A pinch of salt.
Skin the almonds in warm water and ground or pound very fine with all the sugar, to be mixed one tablespoonful at a time.
Cook the farina in the milk and before removing from the fire add the butter and the almonds, which will dissolve easily, being mixed with the sugar. Then put the pinch of salt and wait until it becomes lukewarm to add the eggs that are to be beaten whole previously. Pour the mixture in a baking tin greased evenly with butter, sprinkled with bread crumbs and of such a size that the tart has the thickness of an inch or less. Put it in the oven, remove from the mold when cold and serve whole or cut into sections. 201
The problem is in the almonds, and it is not a matter of technique or timing.
- The three bitter almondsBitter almonds contain amygdalin, which releases hydrogen cyanide when the nut is crushed and moistened — exactly what pounding them with sugar does. They were used across nineteenth-century European baking for their intense marzipan aroma, in the small quantities seen here, but the dose in a raw bitter almond is not trivial and varies from nut to nut.
- Why baking does not settle itHeat drives off some hydrogen cyanide, but the tart is a shallow custard baked briefly, not a long boil, and the almonds are ground into the body of the mixture. There is no way to know from the recipe how much remains. Unrefined bitter almonds cannot legally be sold for eating in the United States and many other countries for this reason.
- Portion size makes it worsePortion size -- the tart is cut into sections, so a single serving carries a share of the three bitter almonds, and children are considerably more susceptible than adults to the same amount.
- Not a substitution noteModern almond extract and commercial bitter almond flavouring are made from benzaldehyde and are unrelated in hazard, but reworking the proportions of a hundred-year-old custard is beyond what this page will do. If you want a semolina tart, use a current recipe.
- What semolino actually isThe "farina finely ground" of this translation is semolino, fine durum semolina, not the soft-wheat breakfast farina sold under that name in the United States. Worth knowing when you read the ingredient list in other entries from this book.
- The pan liningButtering a tin and dusting it with breadcrumbs rather than flour is the standard Italian treatment for a set custard of this kind; the crumbs give a thin crust and release cleanly. That part of the method has not dated.
Torta di semolino belongs to a family of Italian semolina-and-milk sweets that sit between a pudding and a cake — no pastry case at all, despite the English word "tart" in the translation. The technique of cooking fine semolina in milk, enriching it with eggs and ground almonds, and baking it in a shallow buttered tin is old and widespread, and it reads as a domestic version of the almond-and-grain confections that appear in Italian cookery from the Renaissance onward. Bitter almonds appear here in the proportion typical of the period: a very few among the sweet ones, used strictly as a flavouring, in the same way that a recipe might call for a bay leaf. Their use in European home baking was routine until the twentieth century, when sale for culinary purposes came to be restricted — one of the clearer cases of a standard ingredient disappearing from the pantry for reasons of chemistry rather than fashion.