Artusi’s Semolina Cake with a Twist

Semolina cake, or torta di semolino, is one of those things that will bring a smile of nostalgia to those Italians whose grandmothers or great-grandmothers used to make this. This old fashioned cake has a soft, dense and moist texture, similar to a baked cheesecake, delicately flavoured with lemon and almond.

Semolina, also known as semola or semolino is the coarse leftovers of wheat flour and is often used in making fresh pasta and some traditional Italian desserts. For this cake, the semolina is cooked with milk into a sort of porridge until it is soft and creamy.

This recipe comes from Pellegrino Artusi’s cookbook, Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well. Self-published in 1891, this cookbook is still found in practically every kitchen across Italy today, but while many of the recipes are still made as commonly today as they were 120 years ago, some of them went out of fashion or changed over the decades.

Recreating a recipe, particularly a cake recipe, from the late 1800s in a modern kitchen can require a few adjustments before getting just right. Consider, for example, that ingredients like eggs would have been largely home grown at the time, so were likely to be smaller in proportion to today’s common supermarket eggs.

Artusi, in the over 700 recipes of his book, does not give cooking times or indications of heat (which is just as well, since Italian country ovens in the 1800s were significantly different to most modern ovens), and he assumes that many processes or techniques, such as peeling almonds or cooking semolina, are already known to his readers and he does not go into details. So the recipe below has been adapted slightly and expanded to better work in today’s international kitchens.