Mascarpone: Italian for easy, elegant desserts

Delicate, creamy mascarpone cheese is the starting point for countless impressive, easy-to-make desserts. Recipes below.

The holiday season is upon us, which means parties galore. Which means it’s also the season of the little black dress. Women know little black dresses as the simple little tricks in their closets that—with a few accessories—make them look elegant, festive and very, very lovely. Men know them as the things that make us lose our train of thought at parties, because they’re just that good. Marion has one that works like a charm, every time.

Well, when it comes to dinner parties, this is the little black dress of desserts. Simple, sophisticated, infinitely accessorizable. At its heart is mascarpone, a buttery rich double-cream or triple-cream dessert cheese from Italy. Made from cow’s milk and typically containing 60% to 75% milk fat, it is most often known as that intoxicatingly silky cream found in tiramisù.

A quick search on epicurious.com turns up more than 120 recipes for this versatile cheese. Still, they’re the first to admit that “this delicately flavored cheese needs little embellishment other than being topped with fruit.”

The recipe below is almost that simple. A half dozen ingredients thrown into a bowl and beaten with an electric mixer into mascarpone cream. And then a little fruit, nuts, chocolate or what have you to accessorize it. That’s it—no double boilers, no baking, no fuss. So easy for something that tastes so over-the-top decadent and dresses up so beautifully in the right setting. We used smallish vintage martini glasses. Teacups, mismatched or otherwise, could work just as well—especially with a couple of small, plainish, lemony cookies on each saucer. Obviously, the key here is scale. These desserts are served in small portions—serving dishes should be scaled appropriately.

An unexpected bonus for something so delicate tasting is how surprisingly sturdy mascarpone cream is. I mixed up a batch and then started experimenting with the fruit I was adding for one version. Then I fussed over one photo set-up until I decided it wouldn’t work and created a completely different one at the opposite end of the apartment. After the first shot, I decided it would be good to show two variations, and Marion helped me put together the second dessert. The whole time, the mascarpone cream was sitting out on the kitchen counter, no wilting, no running, no collapsing. And the first prepared dessert looked just as good in the last shot as it did in the first. In fact, we even had the remaining cream the next night with more fresh berries, and spending the night in the fridge [covered, of course] hadn’t affected it in the slightest. To me, this says you can whip up the mascarpone cream before company shows up and dress it up when you’re ready to serve dessert. If the kitchen’s particularly hot, you may want to keep it in the fridge.

This recipe is based on one found in Tastes of Italia, the same issue of the magazine that led to last week’s Rosemary Sage Chops. If I get a couple/few recipes out of an entire cookbook, I feel that I’ve gotten my money’s worth. Well, so far I’ve gotten two from one issue of a magazine—and I don’t think I’m done yet.

Continue reading “Mascarpone: Italian for easy, elegant desserts” →

Salad days for peaches

Arugula Salad with Peaches and Goat Cheese, a delicious, lively mix of sweet and savory. Recipe below.

Peaches and I haven’t always been on the best of terms. In fact, I’ll go entire seasons without buying a single one. First, there’s the way they often go directly from being hard as baseballs to mold-covered science experiments, with no apparent moment of just being ripe and ready to eat in between. And even when they do begrudgingly ripen, there’s often something bland or mealy or otherwise disappointing about the taste.

And then there was the tree. When Marion and I bought an old house in St. Louis, the backyard came equipped with a large, ancient peach tree. It provided a shady spot in the yard and a little extra privacy from the house directly across the alley. We looked forward to eating fruit from our very own tree.

Unfortunately, as with many old fruit trees, it had become diseased. Every summer, it faithfully produced bushel upon bushel of peaches, none of them edible. They would drop to the ground, already rotting, creating a fragrant mess on the lawn. No matter how carefully I picked them up before mowing, the mower would invariably find at least one I’d missed. Every bit as pleasant as it sounds.

And then there were the drunken wasps. Or bees or whatever. Attracted by the rotting, fermenting fruit, hundreds of them would swarm loopily around the tree and the lawn, eating the spoiled fruit and becoming completely intoxicated and lethargic. And the problem was, you never knew if they were going to be happy drunks or mean ones.

Each season, sections of the tree would die off, and we would cut away those parts. Gradually, we whittled it down to something we could entirely cut down. That was one of my happiest days as a homeowner.

This year, though, the peaches are amazing. They’ve broken my heart so many times in the past that I usually just walk right by them in the produce department. But this year I couldn’t. Their deep, beautiful color beckoned, even from a distance. Up close, their heady perfume held promise. I picked one up. Not hard as a baseball—just nice and firm and, well, ripe. So I bought some, hopeful but still ready to be disappointed. They. Were. Incredible. Delicious and sweet, with a big peach flavor and a nice, not-too-mushy texture. And the ones that were maybe a day or so away from ripeness obediently ripened without rotting.

Since that first test batch, I’ve been buying them like they’re going out of style. Which, of course, they are—summer won’t last forever. Besides eating them straight, we’ve been cutting them up on cereal, mixing them with plain yogurt, adding them to fruit salads and constantly looking for new ways to use them. Which led to this salad. Continue reading “Salad days for peaches” →

Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered

This Endive Salad with Blue Cheese and Walnuts always reminds me of one of my favorite little New York bistros. Recipe below.

SOMETIMES A RESTAURANT JUST CLICKS WITH YOU. The food, the setting, the staff—even the moment it’s part of. Lucien, in Manhattan’s East Village, is just such a place for us. The moment it fit so neatly into the first time we ate there was the first time Marion and I managed to get to New York together. Marion had spent lots of time there, and I had made a number of three-day solo forays in search of art, jazz and booze [all plentiful there, by the way]. But we only got around to getting there together when I won a trip for two on Taco Bell’s website a few years ago. Seriously. Continue reading “Endive, blue cheese: A great salad remembered” →