I will be cooking for Gordon Ramsay on Monday. Funny how things happen. After having been a fan of his simple, elegant and often spectacular food, it’s my turn to try and impress. His show will be filming at my place of employment, with some of the contestants and the screaming chef himself – and Matt and I are cooking for them.
I shouldn’t get too excited – I have been on way too many tv shows not to know the chaos that culminates in the quick experience of shooting a few takes that will be then edited together. Still. It gives me the chance to officially take my whites out of retirement and mingle with food. The “Chocolate Tower” I will be serving was my signature dessert on the Restaurant menu and it marries two of my favourite edible items ever: chocolate and sabayon.
It all started on those Sunday trips my father and I would take to the Impero Patisserie in Bologna – the establishment is still there but the family who used to own it sold it to a corporation a long time ago and, despite my efforts or, rather, my aunt’s, to find the original pastry chef I was never able to ask the questions that have been with me since I was old enough to appreciate the airy meringues filled with whipped cream, the Neapolitan cake bursting with pastry cream and sour cherries, the hazelnut and chocolate cream puffs that defied gravity. Every Sunday, my dad would let me choose a tray of pastries to take home to crown my mother’s lunch. I was never able to wait, sticking fingers in the pretty cakes while setting the table, my mom yelling in the background to stop being a pig. At least I was the skinniest pig on earth - luckily for me, childhood obesity hadn’t reared its head just yet (or it might have had something to do with my mother’s refusal to buy any kind of packaged food, cookies included). But the king of treats was the “millefeuilles”, which would usually come home with us if guests were expected. It wasn’t like any other millefeuilles I went on to taste: no whipped cream, or pastry cream or exotic ingredients – just handmade thin sheets of gauzy puff pastry layered with sabayon filled with shards of impossibly dark chocolate. Cutting it and eating it was a delicious mess and it took me years to recreate it, taking the flavors apart in my mouth, from a memory still incredibly vivid. I only made it once, for a special occasion – I was feeding a group of women chefs who had come to the Restaurant after a long day of meetings. Just knowing that I could reproduce it was enough satisfaction and I never felt the urge of making it again, for fear of tarnishing a precious memory.
What I couldn’t and wouldn’t give up is the sabayon cream, especially filled with dark chocolate so I went on to create a base of Devil’s food, a middle layer of champagne sabayon and dark Cordillera chocolate and a top of bittersweet chocolate ganache – all fitted into a tall ring to give the tower effect. That dessert is my personal proustian madeleine and every guest who ever ate it, was unwittingly given a piece of my childhood. Will Chef Ramsay taste it on Monday? Unlikely. But that’s beside the point really. The point of cooking is to have fun and to offer what you make in the spirit it was created. From the heart.
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