This Piedmontese Panna Cotta is made with cream, milk and vanilla, chilled until set and turned out onto the plate with its caramel. For this recipe, we use the preparation recognized as a PAT of Piedmont as our reference.
Put the 100 g of sugar and the water in a small saucepan and place over the heat without stirring. Cook until the sugar turns amber, gently swirling the pan if necessary.
Immediately divide the caramel between 6 moulds, tilting them slightly so that it covers the bottom. Leave it to cool while you prepare the panna cotta.
Place the gelatine sheets in a bowl with plenty of cold water and leave them to soften for about 10 minutes.
Pour the cream and milk into a saucepan, then add the 80 g of sugar and the natural vanilla powder. Heat gently, stirring occasionally, until the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is almost at boiling point.
If using a vanilla pod instead of vanilla powder, split it lengthways, scrape out the seeds and add both the seeds and pod to the saucepan. Remove the pod before continuing.
Drain the softened gelatine and gently squeeze out the excess water. Add it immediately to the hot cream and milk and stir until completely dissolved.
Pour the mixture into the moulds over the cooled caramel.
Leave the moulds to cool slightly, then transfer them to the refrigerator and chill the panna cotta for at least 5 hours. You can also prepare it further in advance if convenient.
When you are ready to serve, invert each mould onto a plate and gently release the panna cotta. The caramel left at the bottom of the mould will run over the top and down the sides.
Servings 6
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily value may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs.
The amount of gelatine is important if you want a panna cotta that holds its shape without becoming too firm. With 7 g of gelatine for 600 g of cream and milk, the result should remain soft, although the setting strength of gelatine can vary slightly between brands.
Do not boil the cream and milk for any length of time. Bring the mixture close to boiling point, then remove the saucepan from the heat before adding the soaked and squeezed gelatine.
To make the panna cotta easier to release, you can dip the outside of the mould very briefly in hot water, making sure the water does not touch the dessert. Place the serving plate over the mould, then turn them over together.
Panna cotta can be prepared in advance and kept covered in its moulds in the refrigerator. Turn it out only when you are ready to serve.
Panna cotta is closely associated with Piedmont, but tracing its beginnings is not as straightforward as you might expect. Even the regional documentation does not identify a definite inventor or date of origin.
The best-known story takes us to the Langhe in the early twentieth century. According to tradition, a woman of Hungarian origin prepared a cream-based dessert there which later found a place in Piedmontese cooking. The Piedmont Region still recounts the story today, but with an important qualification: it is said. There is no evidence strong enough to turn the story into established historical fact.
An earlier regional document adds an even more curious detail. In Piedmontese, cream was known as fiore del latte, or "flower of milk", and there was no specific word corresponding to the Italian panna. According to the PAT documentation, this may also suggest that the dessert entered the regional tradition relatively late.
Rather than looking for a precise birthday, we can follow the traces left by similar preparations. Some take us considerably further back in time.
The name panna cotta is so simple that it feels as though it must have always belonged to Italian cooking, yet finding it in old cookbooks is surprisingly difficult.
Historical sources commonly used to reconstruct its development do not find the name in Italian cookbooks before the second half of the twentieth century. That does not necessarily mean similar desserts did not already exist: cream, milk and setting agents had been used in European cooking long before panna cotta appeared under its modern name.
We can follow the history of the name or the history of the technique. In this case, the two paths do not begin at the same point.
One of the most intriguing episodes takes us away from Piedmont. In 1827, while staying in Bologna, Giacomo Leopardi wrote to his father about a preparation called latte e melle and even recorded its composition: fior di latte or cream, unsalted gelatine and sugar.
Those ingredients sound remarkably similar to panna cotta. It would be a stretch, however, to claim that Leopardi was eating the Piedmontese dessert under another name. What the document does tell us is that desserts made by setting cream and sugar with gelatine were already being prepared in nineteenth-century Italy.
The resemblance is clear. A historical connection with Piedmontese panna cotta remains unproven.
In the twentieth century, an important name enters the story: Ettore Songia, chef at the I Tre Citroni restaurant in Cuneo. During the 1960s, he is credited with one of the earliest written codifications of the recipe under the name we still use today.
From there, panna cotta began appearing more frequently in Italian restaurants. A few decades later it had become a familiar sight on menus and was even associated with the restaurant cooking of the 1980s.
Behind a dessert that now seems almost timeless lies a surprisingly difficult story to arrange neatly: a legend from the Langhe, strikingly similar nineteenth-century preparations and a name that only emerges clearly during the twentieth century.