This soft-but-dense, velvety delight is cake at its most pudding-like. It’s at its prime still warm from the oven, but gets gloriously fudgy after a night in the fridge
The note by Elizabeth David is helpful here: “This cake can also be eaten like a pudding” for its soft-dense-velvet-texture. But I am jumping ahead: this week’s column started in Ferrara, a city in the wetlands of the Po delta in the north-eastern corner of Emilia-Romagna. Half medieval lanes and half green avenues and parks, Ferrara is home to one of Europe’s most imposing red-brick castles, one that provides a home to an annual journalism festival run by the magazine Internazionale. Ferrara is also known for a cake. In fact, it was after a discussion about translation and fact-checking with the Italian writer Domenico Starnone and the translator Ann Goldstein that I first ate a wedge of chocolate, butter, egg, sugar and flour torta tenerina.
Having just mentioned fact-checking, I am now going to side-step the origin stories. The name, however, more or less translates as “little tender one”, although that “little” refers more to the fact that it is a bit tender, rather than being on the small side.
