La Mitica Torta d’ Arancia di Anacapri
A while ago, I’d heard from a friend about a tart made with oranges from the groves on the island of Capri, it, once an idyll and now mostly a tourist ruin just seventeen kilometers across the bay from Napoli. Specifically, it was the island’s village of Anacapri that was the scene of my friend’s tart story. She told me that the confection was barely sugared, so perfect were the oranges of its making. She said it was all of a cool cream in the mouth, each little bite of it a sensual, sweet/pungent explosion. She said that even the crust was scented with oranges, perhaps with some locally distilled liqueur of the fruit, and that, too, the crust gave up some soft breath of herb, like wild mint or rosemary. But where in Anacapri, I begged, never having seen the sweet in any pasticceria nor read of it on any menu nor found it perched on any dessert cart. Worse, everyone I asked about the tart shook their heads. “Non c’è una cosa del genere qui, signora.” “There is nothing of that sort here, madam.” This bantering betwixt my friend and I has endured several years. She insists that the tart, indeed, exists. I think it some citrusy half-dream of hers, a tart that should have been, perhaps, but one that never yet was, at least not in Anacapri. And so I baked it, hearing her gurglings and swoonings in my mind at every step. Though I’ve yet to make it for her—she living in Oregon while I’m here in Tuscany—I offer it here and tell you, humbly, of its goodness, of its simple sort of persuasiveness. I think it is the pastry I would make and share and eat on the last day of the world.
Recipe information
Yield
serves 10 to 12
Ingredients
The Pastry
The Filling
Preparation
The Pastry
Step 1
Place the flour, salt, sugar, rosemary, and the orange zest in a medium bowl and rub the cold butter into it with fingertips or a pastry blender until it resembles very coarse crumbs. Combine the egg, the egg yolk, and the liqueur and, with a fork, stir it all into the bowl with the flour mixture, forming a rough paste.
Step 2
Turn it out onto a lightly floured work space and, with a few short strokes, form the mixture into a dough. Flatten the dough into a disc, wrap it tightly in plastic wrap and, place it in the freezer for 20 minutes. Press the rested, chilled dough over the surfaces of a buttered 12- to 14-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Cover the pastry-lined tin in plastic wrap and chill it again, for 20 minutes, in the freezer.
Step 3
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Step 4
With a fork, prick the chilled pastry over its surface and bake it for 10 minutes. Lower the temperature to 375 degrees and continue baking the pastry for an additional 5 or 6 minutes or until it is firmed and barely beginning to take on some color. Cool the pastry thoroughly on a rack. Proceed with the orange cream.
The Filling
Step 5
If the oven is not already hot, preheat it to 400 degrees.
Step 6
In a medium bowl, beat together the orange juice, the zest, the sugar, and the mascarpone, amalgamating the ingredients well. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating vigorously, incorporating each before adding the next. Add the liqueur and beat thoroughly.
Step 7
Pour the orange cream into the prepared pastry and bake the tart for 20 to 25 minutes or until the cream is just firmed and has taken on patches of burnished skin and the crust is deeply golden.
Step 8
Cool the tart on a rack for 15 minutes before removing its ring and permitting it to cool thoroughly. Thickly dust the tart with confectioners’ sugar.
Step 9
Present the tart on the day it was baked, never letting it anywhere near the refrigerator. Offer tiny glasses of the liqueur used in the tart, if you wish or, slipping fast away from Italia, Campania, Napoli, much less Anacapri, pass around a bottle of fine, tawny port.
