Torta Caprese

Torta caprese is more legend than documented history. In the most widely repeated account, singled out by the magazine La Cucina Italiana, the cake was born in 1920 when the Capri pastry cook Carmine Di Fiore, preparing an almond cake for three American gangsters who had come to the island to buy a consignment of spats for Al Capone, forgot to add the flour; the accident produced a cake so good that the guests are said to have asked for the recipe, which took the island's name. Di Fiore did not invent it from nothing: he is said to have reworked an almond cake already known at the Bourbon court of Naples in the seventeen-hundreds. Carrying no flour, the cake is naturally gluten-free, and it has since become the emblematic dolce of Capri, dusted with powdered sugar and often stencilled with the island's faraglioni sea stacks.

The first forkful is pure contrast: a thin, sugar-dusted crust shatters over a cool, dense, almost fudgy interior that melts on the tongue, bittersweet with dark chocolate and rounded by the natural oil of the almonds. There is little crumb to speak of—only a moist, truffled richness lifted by a faint breath of orange.

With no flour, the cake's structure rests on almonds and eggs, with no gluten network at all. Blanched almonds, roughly half fat, are ground to a meal that holds moisture and stays tender, since without gluten there is nothing to toughen. Melted dark chocolate and butter fold in as fat that coats every particle and gives the dense, truffled body. Lift comes only from egg whites whipped to stiff peaks: their proteins trap air into a stable foam that, folded in gently, expands in the oven and then coagulates to set a light, moist crumb. At the surface, water evaporates and sugars crystallise and lightly caramelise into the thin, crackled crust, while the fat-rich, almond-heavy interior holds its moisture and stays soft.