A Recipe to Remember: Gina DePalmaâ s Three-Cheese Tart Updated Feb. 25, 2016 12:23 p.m. ET WE WERE IN the middle of a heated email exchange about blackberries when Gina DePalma got personal. "Honey," she wrote, "you cannot walk through life trying to please everyone." The awardwinning pastry chef who oversaw the desserts at Mario Batali's Babbo in Greenwich Village for 15 years did not concern herself with potential haters. Still, no matter the ingredient, in Gina's hands the results were likely to please everyone, a lot. Her honey and pine-nut crostata made people appreciate pignoli; her saffron-infused panna cotta showed them how agreeable that musky spice is to a sweet application, not to mention how luscious that wobbly cream can be. She clung as fiercely to her beliefs--culinary, political and otherwise--as she did to her resolve to live. Diagnosed with stage-4 ovarian cancer in 2008, Gina refused to give up until forced to succumb at the end of last year, at the age of 49. Though she raised awareness and money for a cure, she was adamant the disease wouldn't define her. She wanted to be known for her work. I think that's one of the reasons I decided to stay up the night she died and reread her cookbook, "Dolce Italiano." The book begins, coincidentally, "It is just past two o'clock in the morning, and I am awake in my tiny bedroom in Brooklyn." Lingering over the pages, I was reminded of her nimbleness as a writer and the significance of her contribution to her craft. Working under her mentor, Claudia Fleming, at Manhattan's Gramercy Tavern in the 1990s, Gina was immersed in a new style of seasonally directed pastry that brought the best ingredients to the fore using French technique. Perfectly executed, her desserts were never fussy. A first-generation Italian-American, Gina inherited a near holy regard for produce. It might have been second nature to her to merge the lessons of http://www.africancentury.co.mz/ the Gramercy galley with those of her family kitchen and take modern-American desserts in a traditional-Italian direction, but restaurant-goers in the U.S. hadn't tasted anything like her pastries before. I was introduced to Gina first as a diner at Babbo, then as a home cook, through her recipes. We didn't meet in person until I interviewed her for a book I wrote on female chefs. She was completely uncensored in discussing her experiences in the professional kitchen--what she'd loved, what she'd become disillusioned with. I was struck by how ferociously she cared. As her pastry protégée Melissa Weller of Sadelle's, in SoHo, told me, "Gina was particularly talented in balancing flavors in a minimalist way." That's certainly true of her Three-Cheese Tart with Chocolate and Orange. Mascarpone, ricotta and cream cheese are whipped together to form a tangy, subtly vanilla-infused filling that only by force of willpower on the part of the cook ever makes it into the cocoa-almond tart shell. The citrus comes in the form of a marmalade glaze. I'm especially fond of this tart because it presents an often polarizing combination--chocolate and orange--in an approachable package.
Gina might have said that's beside the point. "You have to make the cake you want to make," she once argued. And then, in the same email: "Part of what we do as cooks is get people to open their minds and their palates to new things." How lucky we were to have her do that for us.
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