A few years ago my husband found an old notebook with his mother’s recipes.
It brought back memories of long-forgotten dishes that he used to love as a child, growing up in the beautiful hills of Monferrato, a region in northwestern Italy.
Such a trove of traditional recipes was well worth handing down to future generations, and he decided to collect them in a cookbook. It turned out to be a task much harder than he had foreseen because, like so many expert cooks of her generation, my mother-in-law Alma knew by heart most of her recipes and therefore she often recorded in her notebook only the ingredients and some very basic directions. Moreover, she took for granted that everybody knew how to make things like béchamel sauce or homemade pasta and she didn’t think necessary to explain how to prepare them.
In some cases, she scribbled the name of the dish on a scrap of paper, with a list of the ingredients accompanied by vague annotations like “a little more than half a kilo” or “cook for a little longer than an hour in a warm oven” or the cryptic Q.B. – Quanto Basta – “as much as needed”.
What my husband thought would be a matter of scanning her notebook and typing her recipes became a patient work of love and reconstruction.
My contribution consisted in filling the gaps in her recipes and cooking some of them to figure out oven temperatures, or how much quantities like “a little more than half a kilo” were. No matter how hard I tried, the results of my cooking efforts were never comparable to the tasty dishes that Alma used to make.
This taught us a very important lesson: in the kitchen – as in life – experience matters more than precision and procedure. And, most importantly, if you put your heart in the things you make – like Alma did with her cooking – the results are amazing.
The book we published is in Italian, but I will translate some of Alma’s recipes, to honor the countless hours she spent in the kitchen to make family and friends happy while eating her beautiful dishes.
This hazelnut cake was one of her specialties.
Ingredients: A V Gf
(Serves 8)
- 8 oz. of hazelnuts
- 3 Tbsp. of organic brown sugar
- 2 Tbsp. corn starch
- 2 eggs + 1 egg white
- 4 Tbsp. butter, melted
- ½ cup of water
- 2 tsp. baking powder
- 1 pinch of salt
Warm the oven at 360 F.
Grind the hazelnuts together with the sugar to obtain a floury meal.
In a mixing bowl, mix together the hazelnut meal, the corn starch, the baking powder and the salt. Add the 2 eggs, the melted butter and the water, stirring well.
In a separate bowl, whip the egg white with an electric beater until white and stiff. Add the whipped egg white to the mix by folding it in with a spatula, with delicate movements from the bottom to the top.
Grease a round 10-inch baking pan and pour the mix into it. Cook for 25/30 minutes at 360 F. Remove from baking pan, let cool on a cooling rack and serve at room temperature.
Hazelnut cake is usually served with Zabaione (see recipe).