Most of my grandma’s recipes, like this robiola cake, live in our memory.
Sometimes, I feel sorry thinking about the ones we lost.
But, more often, I am happy for those we have recovered, patiently cooking until we have reconstructed the flavors we remembered.
Nonna collected recipes as others do stamps.
Her repertoire ranged from traditional Romagna and Bolognese recipes to Italian and French classics. Her execution of the dessert Mont Blanc was masterful. (HERE on the blog, you will find my version with white American sweet potatoes.)
She also exchanged recipes and advice through letters with friends and acquaintances. Unfortunately, we have lost those epistles like the dishes Grandma never wrote.
And we have now given up hope of finding them.
All that remains of her cooking are notes. For example, the ones she wrote while on the phone with a friend, taking notes of ingredients or parts of the process on whatever piece of paper was at hand that, once time, phones were attached to the wall.
Unlike her letters, we know about these scribbled cooking notes because some have come to us. Grandma used these pieces of paper as page markers. And it still happens today to find some among the pages of old books.
The black notebook
The greatest gift Grandma left was a selection of recipes she wrote for her daughter.
At that time, my mom didn’t cook and wasn’t interested in it, but Nonna said that, sooner or later, it would come in handy.
More than recipes, the notes collected in the black-covered notebook are short lists without precise indications of amounts or methods.
Among those thin pages yellowed by time, it is easy to sense an expert hand that did not need detailed written recipes because she went by eye and memory. To tell the truth, I don’t remember Nonna cooking while holding a paper or book open on the table.
In the collection she wrote for my mom, alongside the classics of local cuisine, my maternal grandmother included desserts. Almost always, these are recipes I do not know and do not remember ever having tasted, to the detriment of those she usually cooked.
We never understood what criterion guided her choice.
The robiola cake
I am grateful for that notebook but even disappointed that the recipes for cakes and cookies we loved are not there. Above all, my grandma’s favorites were all the cakes made with ricotta, mascarpone, or robiola. But on the other hand, there is a recipe for Sicilian cassata.
An almost touching thing happened recently.
We returned in possession of the recipe for her famous tiramisu, which, among desserts, was one of the highlights of Christmas lunch. The granddaughter of a lady to whom grandmother gave the recipe found a sheet of paper that said Sara’s Tiramisu.
She phoned my mom to tell her about the episode, and we asked her about the process. Also, Grandma sometimes used to title the dish with the name of the person who shared the recipe with her. As I told you at the beginning of the post, the robiola cake is not in the collection.
Then, a thing happened. Years ago, my mom and I reconstructed many of her recipes.
Right around that time, Magda, the in-house cook at the publishing house where I worked as an editor, gave me a collection of her dishes as a gift.
To return to the taste of the cake, adding more lemon juice was enough to regain the cake flavor I remembered.
My mom was pleased, too. Now, we make Magda’s robiola cake, which looks like Grandma’s. It’s a bit of a long title, but we call it that.
About the cake, I won’t leave you any advice; the process is disarmingly simple. If you follow the steps and respect the quantities of the ingredients, everyone will ask you for the recipe. In Romagna, robiola cake is considered the local answer to American cheesecake, which, it must be said, has European origins.
Buona cucina, Monica
Life and kitchen
Of my experience at Il Mulino, a Bolognese publishing house, and Magda’s, I told in the post where you find Bologna mortadella mousse, another recipe among those in her repertoire (HERE).
Cook with me
If you, like me, love cheese, look at the Ricotta Cheese Cake. You won’t regret it (HERE).
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Robiola cake
Equipment
- round mold, 20 cm in diameter
Ingredients
Base
- 200 g of Digestive-type cookies
- 100 g of butter
Robiola cream
- 3 regular eggs
- 200 g of robiola cheese
- 200 g of caster sugar
- 60 g of potato starch
- 1/2 liter of heavy cream unsweetened
- 1 teaspoon of natural vanilla extract
- filtered juice of 1 little lemon
- 1 pinch of salt
Instructions
Base
- Separate the yolks from the egg whites and arrange the yolks and egg whites in two different bowls. Choose a large bowl for the yolks because that is where you will mix the cream.
- Whip the egg whites with electric whips and set aside.
- Preheat the oven to 170C (338F) degrees.
- Add robiola and sugar to the yolks and whip with an electric whisk.
- Then, add starch, heavy cream, natural vanilla extract, salt, and lemon juice to the bowl and incorporate the ingredients with the whisk.
- Also, add the whipped egg whites and incorporate by gently mixing from the bottom to the top using a spatula.
- Pour the cream over the base and bake in a preheated oven for about 60-70 minutes, raising the temperature to 180C (356F) when baking. Check the baking by testing with a toothpick. The cake is ready when the wooden toothpick comes out dry. Cover with aluminum foil if, during the cooking, the surface seems to become too dark.
- Take the cake out of the oven, let it cool in the mold, dust it with powdered sugar, and gently move it to the serving dish.
- Make the cake one or even two days in advance by storing it in the refrigerator.
- Store in the refrigerator for up to a week.
