Rachel Roddy’s recipe for torta tenerina, or rich chocolate cake | A kitchen in Rome

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. Especially because tenerina recipes from Ferrara call for tins ranging from 24-26cm in size, which produce slender cakes that are gently cracked on top and tacolenta (sticky) within; in fact, another name for the cake is torta tacolenta.

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