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Mantua Tart
(Torta Mantovana) Flour, six ounces.
Sugar, six ounces.
Butter, five ounces.
Sweet almonds and pine-seeds, two ounces.
One whole egg.
Four egg-yolks.
A taste of lemon peel.
First work well with a ladle the eggs with the sugar, then pour the flour little by little, still stirring, and finally the butter, previously melted in a double steamer (bain-marie). Put the mixture in a pie-dish greased with butter and sprinkled with flour or bread crumbs ground. On top put the almonds and the pine-seeds. Cut the latter in half and cut the almonds, previously skinned in warm water, each in eight or ten pieces. This tart must not be thicker than one inch, so that it can dry well in the oven, which must not be too hot.
Sprinkle with powdered sugar and serve cold.
A plain butter-and-egg cake baked shallow in a pie dish, closer to a rich sponge than to anything a modern cook would call a tart. The instructions are complete but assume a good deal of judgment about oven heat and batter handling.
- Weights, not cupsSix ounces flour is about 170 g (roughly 1 1/4 cups), six ounces sugar about 170 g (3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons), five ounces butter about 140 g. A scale is worth using here, since the whole structure depends on the flour-to-fat-to-egg ratio.
- The oven that "must not be too hot"The recipe names no temperature; a moderate oven, somewhere around 325-350F, suits it. The cake is only an inch deep, and a hotter oven will colour the almonds and set the crust before the centre dries. Roughly twenty-five to thirty-five minutes in a 9-inch dish; a skewer should come out clean.
- Beat the eggs and sugar properlyThis is the hinge. There is no chemical leavening, so all the lift comes from air whipped into one whole egg and four yolks with the sugar. Work them until pale, thick and ribboning — five to eight minutes with a mixer — then fold the flour in gently rather than stirring it out.
- Butter temperatureMelt the butter in a bain-marie as directed, then let it cool to barely warm before adding. Hot butter will slacken the foam you just built. Pour it down the side of the bowl and fold, do not beat it in.
- Pine-seedsPine nuts, sold as pignoli. Two ounces (about 55 g) appears to cover both them and the almonds together -- split the quantity as you like. Almond skins slip off after a short soak in warm water, as the recipe directs.
- "Pie-dish"A shallow round tin or ceramic dish about 9 inches across, buttered and dusted. The one-inch depth is not a suggestion; in a deeper, narrower tin the middle stays damp while the edges dry out.
- Yield and servingEight to ten small wedges. It is meant to be served cold, dusted with icing sugar, and it keeps two or three days wrapped — the crumb firms and the almond flavour comes forward on the second day.
Torta mantovana belongs to the repertoire that Pellegrino Artusi collected in La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), the book that stands behind a great deal of this English-language Italian cookery writing of the 1910s. Despite the name, the dish is associated with Tuscany rather than with Mantua itself, and it is still baked in and around Prato; a name separated from its region is common enough in Italian baking. Its character is old-fashioned in a specific way: no baking powder, no milk, the rise coming entirely from egg beaten with sugar, which is how cakes were leavened before chemical raising agents became household staples. The pine nuts and blanched almonds strewn over the top give the cake its finish, with powdered sugar the only glaze.