I love watching Pasta Grannies, a YouTube channel produced by a British food ethnographer, Vicky Bennison, who interviews elder cooks all over Italy to learn their regional specialties.
I never make anything from their brief vignettes but this lemon pudding really spoke to me, and it's delicious. Low sugar - basically eggs and lemon. Double it for this quartet of pictures - baked for Passover 2022 in Chestertown.
3 eggs, separated in bowls you can beat in
2 to 3 T sugar
1 lemon
option: add 1/2 cup of berries. I tried blueberries and it worked.
Boil the lemon until it is soft, and puree in a food processor. Let it cool. (Since you mix it with the egg yolks, if it's hot it will cook the yolks.)
Spray an 8" springform or souffle pan. The grannies also sugar the pan.
Beat the egg yolks and sugar, and mix in the puréed lemon.
Beat the whites until they form stiff peaks. Fold the whites into the yolks until the batter is uniform in color. Add berries if you like.
Bake at around 365 for a half hour or so in the Breville. Cover with foil if the top browns too fast.
It puffs up and deflates, making a nice concave holder for fresh berries. The nonnas serve it with whipped cream. Not my thing.
(The boiled citrus is like the clementine cake, but this is very light, hence more like a pudding.)
This would be fun to make on Pesach - refreshing, not too hard, and even parve/ gluten free.
Check out Claudia Roden's yogurt cake, which is the same basic idea with the addition of, you guessed it, yogurt. You can also add blueberries.
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