Comfort Me with Apple Cake
Baking away a week of internet woes
Saluti from Penne, where my husband and I have spent the last week chasing a unicorn known as internet service. In so doing, we have finally met the infamous beast that is Italian bureaucracy.
I say “last week,” but really it’s more like the last six months. We bought our little place in January. In May, when I was here for work, I visited the one store in town that handles cellular and Wi-Fi service. The situation looked promising, easy even; I picked a high-speed plan and signed a contract. Having a reliable connection would allow me to work from home, rather than always having to walk down to the local coffee bar and use their Wi-Fi (which they kindly gave me access to). I had only to wait a few days for a modem to arrive in the mail, and then a technician would be in touch about installation. No problem.
There was a problem. Turns out our house has no phone line (possibly it was taken out when the house was restored). Installing a fiber optic cable, the technician explained, would involve grabbing a nearby phone line, then running the cable through our exterior wall into our living room. Drilling through three feet of stone, brick and stucco did not seem like a great idea to me. I cancelled the contract. In July we tried again (I’ll spare you the details), and on Monday, we resumed our quest once more. But with each carrier we tried to sign up with, we ran into problems, mostly having to do with proof of some sort. Of what? I’m still not sure. We had our passports. Not enough. One carrier needed us to have an Italian back account. Another required a “permesso di soggiorno” or long-term visa. Or something like that. I think. A third wanted a pint of blood. Okay, that last one is a lie, but we might have done it if it meant a reliable internet connection!
Finally, on Thursday afternoon, after wearing a path between our house and the Wi-Fi store (1 km downhill on the way, 2 km uphill on the return—at least it felt like 2 km) we broke our unwritten rule of spending our €uros as much as possible in our town and drove down to the mall in Città Sant’Angelo, where the clerk at a big box electronics store set us up with a plan that required only a passport. As of right now, we are awaiting a modem in the mail, and if/when it arrives (there is no guarantee that anything arrives at our house, whose street address is long and contains the phrase “alley of the three columns”), we will insert the corresponding SIM card that the clerk gave us and hope for that elusive, longed-for connection. I am skeptical. On the upside, I am now in great shape.
Anyway, following this week of minor frustrations, I needed to bake a cake. A simple cake always improves my mood, and I had in mind a torta di mele that I enjoyed during our recent culinary tour of Liguria and Emilia-Romagna. It was set out every morning on the breakfast buffet at our hotel in Santa Margherita. The cake was plain but pretty, with thin slices of apples arranged neatly over a dense crumb. It was almost like a soft, tender, Amish-style sugar cookie topped with apples.
There is nothing better than an Italian breakfast cake. I’ve collected lots of recipes for them over the years, and when I asked for this one, the chef kindly wrote it down.
Paid subscribers will find the recipe at the end of the newsletter. Free subscribers, you’ll find links to three apple cake recipes on my website.
A word about the chef: In our celebrity chef-obsessed culture, it’s easy to forget that most chefs do their job quietly, without fanfare or even recognition. This chef, whose name I’m sorry to say I didn’t get, was there early every morning for breakfast service, and every evening until the last dinner had been plated and sent forth from the kitchen; salt-and-pepper hair and bushy mustache, slightly haggard, always in a pair of faded red chef’s pants and a rumpled white jacket.
He was an excellent cook. The evening before our tour guests arrived, I had dinner on my own in the dining room, and enjoyed a really good seafood risotto, studded with baby clams, tiny mussels, and shrimp, slightly brothy, tinged pink with tomato and smacking of the sea’. Another evening, the chef prepared roast beef for our group. We were all expecting thick slabs of meat on our plates; instead, the rosy lean beef had been sliced nearly as thin as carpaccio. It was served at room temperature, the slices overlapping slightly, with nothing but a little of the cooking juice to flavor it. It was so tender you could have cut it with a spoon. It had me fantasizing about buying a meat slicer so I could (try to) reproduce it at home. When I complimented the chef, he credited the quality of the meat rather than his own roasting skills.
Following his (sparse) instructions “forno 180° X 30 minuti” I made the chef’s apple cake and it brightened my mood immediately. Scroll down for the recipe, which I’m calling Torta di Mele Santa Margherita.
What I’m Reading
· Italy has 334 ‘most beautiful’ villages (borghi più belli d’Italia). Can the official designation save them? By Washington Post’s Chico Harlan
· A federal magistrate judge ruled pasta giant Barilla cannot duck a class action for false and deceptive advertising, via Courthouse News. (People, Barilla is not high quality pasta. Look for better brands, such as Rustichella d’Abruzzo, Cocco, La Molisana, and Faella.)
· Isola Grande, Isola Piccola, by Francesca Marciano. I enjoyed Marciano’s novel Casa Rossa, about a crumbling farmhouse in Puglia and the generations of family who inhabit it. I’ve only just started reading this one, published in 2015, which (so far) centers on an adolescent girl and her siblings as they cope with the untimely loss of their mother. I read Casa Rossa in English; this time I’m being ambitious and reading Isola Grande, Isola Piccola in Italian.
· What We Talk About When We Talk About Dumplings: This is one of the books that was part of the giveaway I did a few weeks ago for paid subscribers. The book’s official publication day was October 18, so I thought I’d give it another shout out here. It explores the wide world of dumplings, and includes a handful of recipes. I’m honored to have an essay (with recipe) for gnocchi published included.
What I’m Eating
Lots of cheese and vegetables. Maybe it’s because our kitchen in Penne still has minimal cooking equipment. Or because the weather has been so mild. Or possibly it was all the food on the tour. But I haven’t felt like doing any elaborate cooking or eating. So my husband and I have mostly been enjoying fresh local cheeses accompanied by vegetables: green bean and tomato salad (there are still a few tomatoes hanging around), sautéed rapini, fresh borlotti beans, radicchio dressed with good olive oil and vinegar. One day I followed the suggestion of our local cheese lady, Franca, and seared thick slices of primo sale (fresh salted cheese), like I do with halloumi at home. Heaven (pictured above). Occasionally we’ve headed to Mavà, the small wine bar down the hill from our house for a couple of glasses of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo and a platter of salumi and cheeses served with bread dampened with olive oil.
APPLE CAKE RECIPES
Classic Torta di Mele: This homespun cake has apples in every bite. It’s scented with lemon zest and topped with chopped walnuts.
Torta di Mele con Sambuca: a tender cake spiked with anise liqueur that gets better as it sits.
Venetian Apple Cake: a cinnamon-sprinkled cake from cookbook author Paola Bacchia.
NEW RECIPE: Torta di Mele Santa Margherita
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