For a lovely cheesecake with ricotta, you should not look further than Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well (1891) by Pellegrino Artusi. First, because it's Italian. Second, because it's reliable. And third, because it's amusing.
Produced on the Italian peninsula since the Bronze Age, ricotta is featured in some of the loveliest desserts. Its neutral flavor is perfect for using instead of milk, which is harder to bind, or cream, which is richer in fat. Ricotta is the base for layered cake fillings as well as puddings and tarts. It's a versatile ingredient like potato, rice, yoghurt and carrot. Naturally, a bowl of ricotta can be eaten alone for dessert, lightly sweetened with honey or fruits. Torte or torta, a culinary term used internationally for German or Italian desserts, is a light cake with or without a base. In the case of Pellegrino Artusi (& his followers), a torta is more or less what English housewives would label as baked pudding.
Actually, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well features two cakes with ricotta, no. 639 (torta di ricotta) and no. 663 (budino di ricotta), that are prepared in exactly the same way and using almost exactly the same ingredients. The first is typically a cheesecake in which the filling is placed on a bed of 'crazy dough', i.e. a simple dough of flour and water that's incredibly easy to make. Interestingly, Artusi notes that a wafer-thin base is used only for embellishment and for tidiness' sake (!) and that guests should decide themselves whether or not to eat it. This reminds of the earliest tart recipes whose shells were not edible although prepared with flour and water but one can't help asking oneself whether a butterless crust was suitable for a tart filled with ricotta. Obviously, a layer of dough under moist filling would never bake well. The mixture used for 'torta di ricotta' is also slightly denser than for pudding: in recipe no. 639, a total of 8 yolks and 4 whites is mixed with 500g of cheese whereas no. 663 uses 7.5 whole eggs to bind the same amount of ricotta. This is perfectly normal because torta di ricotta was actually served at weddings.
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| Depiction of a 14th c. fight in Bologna among Guelphs and Ghibellines |
What fascinates the history-lover, besides the detailed instructions for assembling the cake (& pudding), is Pellegrino's sincere admiration of the regional cuisines -including the habits of people whose birth was inferior to his. He declares torta di ricotta, which is a specialty of Romagna, 'superior to many of the prettified desserts prepared by professional pastrymakers.' National, or regional, pride is much more important to him than social division. In fact, Pellegrino whose birthplace Forlimpopoli is located in the northwest of Romagna, was not alone to praise the rustic life of this country: its banner is decorated with a rooster that holds a steel rod. Conscious of its agrarian economy as well as its Ghibelline (anti-papal) history, Romagna participated in the Italian movement for unification though it never obtained the status of an independent province: as of 1860, it's part of Emilia-Romagna.
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