The tarantella is a dance, everybody knows that. A dance of southern Italy, all jumps and mandolins that becomes a kind of ironic soundtrack of the Italians abroad.
What do you do when it comes to celebrate Italy, which starts as background music? A beautiful tarantella. For years here in Buenos Aires in school parties dedicated to immigrants or to celebrate the various communities including Italian, I witnessed the inexorable tarantella, with its red and white shirt and skirts for girls. Obviously with plastic tambourine.
I love the tarantella, I like its hypnotic and hysterical rhythm, I like the pizzica that leads to a climax with a Dionysian and hellish dance. I love the violin in a constant crescendo that backfires on itself, but I hate the tarantella for export, the one with the tambourine out of tune, that of iammeiamme, what is the musical equivalent of the strange interpretations of Italian cuisine like fettucine Alfredo, the tiramisu without mascarpone, pesto with parsley.
But the battle is lost, because we Italian are very bad exporters of our culture and great importers of fashion, gastronomy and musical suggestions. The Italian stand at the Book Fair of Buenos Aires was something sad and painful, filled with nothing but textbooks of Italian language, and strangely despite everything, was full of people who looked greedy those four novels that were fetched .
And then let’s dance the iammeiamme tarantella (that in the original would be also nice) and eat the fettuccine Alfredo, we deserve them, and keep secret that there are a number of tarantella, the Neapolitan, the Salento or pizzica, and Calabrese, that the Sorrentine languid as the movement of the sirens.
Here I put just a small taste of real good taranetlla: la pizzica of Salento.
In Argentina the tarantella has even a dessert that is called just so: Tarantella, or better Apple Tarantella . It ‘a classic dessert that you can find in bodegones or pizzerias in the capital, where there is the most authentic cuisine of Buenos Aires, the one that came from the many who have immigrated to this country and where the of Spanish and Italian cuisines are the more popular.
I made some effort to convince my porteños friends about the fact that the Tarantella does not exists in the panorama of the classic Italian dessert, but it would be easier to convince them of the existence of the unicorn or of the flying donkey. There were some who have tried to convince me that it’s the tradition: with subtle disquisition on the fact that after being bitten by a tarantula and danced to eliminate poisonous toxins, it’s necessary to restore energies with a caloric treat. I gave up.
Anyway, it’s a good and smart dessert , ideal for recycle slices of bread, that together with the apple slices and eggs make it something like a cross between a flan and a bread pudding.
GLUTEN FREE APPLE TARANTELLA
Preparation time: 15 minutes
Rest time: 12 hours in the refrigerator after cooking
Cooking time: 90 minutes
Difficulty: Easy
Servings: 8-10
Ingredients:
20 slices of sandwich bread cut thin (you can use these easily the Schär Pan Carré)
200 g of butter
500 g of red apples (about 2 large apples)
8 large eggs
150 g of sugar
250 ml of fresh cream
For the caramel:
300 g of sugar
100 ml of water
You need:
A cake mold of 28 cm *
A casserole for the caramel
A big bowl
Ladles and knives
A pan to bake in a water bath
* You use any mold, the important thing is that the dessert must be covedere with the eggs, sugar and cream mixture.
Preparation:
Prepare the caramel: in a thick-bottomed saucepan combine the sugar and water until sugar becomes a nice golden color.
Pour the caramel into the mold.
Mix the eggs with the sugar and the cream, without extra beating the compound, just mixing.
Eliminate the crust of bread slices and grease with butter at room temperature.
Peel the apples and cut into thin slices.
Preheat the oven at low temperature: 160 degrees.
Now make the dessert: make a layer of bread on top of the caramel, with the buttered side down, sprinkle with a little of the egg and cream mixture.
Add a double layer of apple slices.
Cover with the slices of bread, the mixture of eggs and apple slices ending with a layer of bread with the buttered side facing up.
Pour what remains of the mixture of eggs on the whole surface of the bread.
Bake the cake in oven at 160 in a water bath for about 90 minutes.
Remove from the oven and let it cool without pull out fron the mold and put in the fridge for 12 hours, then hen pull it out of the mold by putting the base of the mold in warm water, so that the caramel melts well and serve the Tarantella at room temperature..
Some people eat it with a generous spoonful of dulce de leche or cream. Let’s say that then you must dance …
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