Italian Grape Cake | Torta Bertolina
Updated: 6 days ago
Torta Bertolina is the cake that Crema bakes when the uva fragola comes in. It is flat, dark, damp in the middle and covered in whole grapes that have burst and sunk halfway into the crumb, and it is one of the very few Italian cakes built around a grape that almost nobody eats at the table any more. The variety is the strawberry grape, small, blue black, thin skinned and so intensely perfumed that people who meet it for the first time are convinced somebody has added flavouring. Nobody has. That musky note of strawberry and candyfloss is simply what the fruit smells like.
The cake is deliberately rustic and it resists every attempt to refine it. The grapes go in whole and unpeeled, with their pips still inside, because taking the pips out of six hundred grams of grapes the size of a fingernail is a task no Cremasca cook has ever agreed to do, and because the pips carry tannin that keeps all that sugar and perfume from turning cloying. The batter is loose rather than fluffy, closer to a plumcake than to a sponge, and it has to be, since the grapes shed a great deal of juice as they heat and a light aerated batter would simply drown.
What follows is the Crema version of the cake, baked in a springform tin rather than a rectangular baking sheet so the sides stay tall enough to hold the fruit, with a lemon and mascarpone cream whisked to order for the plate. The cream is the only concession to restaurant service and it is an honest one, since the cake is dense, sweet and fruity and wants something cold, loose and faintly acidic beside it. Everything else is the cake as it is sold by the slice from Crema bakeries through September and October.
Yield: 8 servings, one 9 in (23 cm) cake. Prep: 30 minutes. Bake: 50 minutes. Cooling: 2 hours. Total: about 3 hours 20 minutes. Difficulty: easy to intermediate. Course: dessert. Region: Crema, Lombardy.
The Story
Crema sits on the flat land between Milan and Cremona, in the part of Lombardy where the Serio runs and where farmhouses kept a pergola of uva fragola beside the courtyard rather than a proper vineyard. That pergola is the origin of the cake. Strawberry grape is a labrusca hybrid brought to Europe from North America in the nineteenth century, planted at first because it resisted phylloxera and the mildews that were destroying European vines, and then kept for a much more domestic reason: it grows almost anywhere, it needs no spraying, and it gives shade over a courtyard while producing more fruit than any single family can eat fresh. Bertolina is what the Cremaschi did with the surplus.
The wine made from the same grape is where the story turns strange. Fragolino, the sweet frothy red pressed from uva fragola, was once the everyday wine of the Veneto and eastern Lombardy, and it is now effectively unsellable: European rules exclude direct producing labrusca hybrids from commercial wine, so the grape survives legally as table fruit, as home production and as cake. Torta Bertolina is therefore one of the last public uses of a variety that used to be everywhere, which is exactly why Crema defends it so loudly.
The defence is organised. The Festa della Bertolina has been held in Crema every autumn for decades, in the days around the end of September and the start of October, with bakeries and confraternities selling the cake by weight in the streets of the old centre and a competition for the best one. The name itself is local and its origin is genuinely uncertain: the most repeated explanation in Crema is that it recalls a woman named Bertolina who baked it, and there is no document to confirm it. What is documented is the season. The cake exists for the six weeks when the fruit is ripe, and outside that window a Cremasco will tell you frankly that it is not worth making.
Ingredients
For the grapes
Uva fragola, strawberry grapes, pulled off the stems, 1 lb 5 oz (600 g)
All purpose flour, for dusting the fruit, 1 tbsp (8 g)
Granulated sugar, 1 tbsp (13 g)
For the batter
All purpose flour, 2 cups (250 g)
Granulated sugar, 3/4 cup (150 g)
Unsalted butter, melted and cooled to lukewarm, 7 tbsp (100 g)
Large eggs, 2, at room temperature
Whole milk, 1/2 cup (120 ml), at room temperature
Baking powder, 2 1/2 tsp (10 g)
Fine sea salt, 1/2 tsp (3 g)
Grated zest of 1 unwaxed lemon
Vanilla extract, 1 tsp (5 ml)
For the lemon mascarpone cream
Mascarpone, cold, 7 oz (200 g)
Heavy cream, cold, 1/3 cup (80 ml)
Powdered sugar, 2 tbsp (16 g)
Grated zest of 1/2 unwaxed lemon
Fresh lemon juice, 1 tsp (5 ml)
For finishing
Granulated sugar for the crust, 2 tbsp (25 g)
Unsalted butter for the tin, 1 tbsp (14 g)
Springform tin, 9 in (23 cm), base lined with parchment
Oven at 350°F (175°C), rack in the lower third
Preparation
Pick over and dry the grapes
Pull the grapes off the stems one by one rather than cutting the bunches, discarding any that are split, shrivelled or marked. Leave them whole. Do not peel them, do not halve them and do not attempt to remove the pips: the skins hold the colour and most of the perfume, and the pips are part of the cake in Crema. Rinse the fruit in cold water, then spread it on a clean towel and dry it thoroughly, turning the grapes so that no water sits in the dimple where the stem came away. Wet grapes will thin the batter around them and leave grey channels through the crumb.
Dust the fruit and set the oven
Put the dry grapes in a bowl, scatter over the tablespoon of flour and the tablespoon of sugar and turn them gently with your hands until each one carries a barely visible film. This is the single most important preparation in the recipe: the flour absorbs the first juice that escapes as the grapes heat and holds the fruit in suspension for the first ten minutes of baking, when the batter is still fluid. Heat the oven to 350°F (175°C) with a rack in the lower third, butter the springform tin generously and line the base with parchment.
Mix the wet ingredients
Whisk the eggs with the sugar, the lemon zest and the salt for about 3 minutes, until the mixture is pale and has thickened enough to fall from the whisk in a ribbon. Whisk in the vanilla, then the lukewarm melted butter in a thin stream, then the milk. Keep the butter lukewarm rather than hot, around 95°F (35°C): hot butter will cook the eggs into threads, and cold butter will seize into flecks that never disperse. The mixture at this point looks thin and slightly separated, which is correct.
Bring the batter together
Sift the flour with the baking powder directly over the bowl and fold it in with a spatula in as few strokes as will make it homogeneous, stopping while one or two floury streaks are still visible. The batter should be thick enough to fall slowly from the spatula but far looser than a sponge batter. Overworking it builds gluten, and a tight elastic batter traps the juice the grapes release instead of absorbing it, which produces the wet seam under the fruit that ruins most home versions of this cake.
Fold in half the grapes
Tip about two thirds of the dusted grapes into the batter and fold them through with four or five slow turns of the spatula. Fold, do not stir. Every extra turn breaks skins, and broken skins release juice into the batter before it has any structure to hold it. Reserve the remaining third of the fruit for the surface. The batter will look overloaded with grapes and thin on batter. That is exactly the ratio Bertolina is supposed to have.
Fill the tin and crown it with the rest of the fruit
Scrape the batter into the prepared tin and level it with an offset spatula, then scatter the reserved grapes evenly over the surface, pressing them in only enough to seat them. Leave them proud of the batter rather than buried, since the grapes on top are meant to roast, split and caramelise where they meet the air. Sprinkle the 2 tablespoons of sugar over the whole surface. That sugar draws a little juice from the top grapes and sets into the thin crackling crust that distinguishes a good Bertolina from a plain fruit cake.
Bake and judge the centre
Bake at 350°F (175°C) for 45 to 50 minutes. The cake is ready when the top is deep golden with darkened split grapes, the edges have pulled slightly from the tin, and a skewer pushed into the crumb between two grapes comes out with damp crumbs but no raw batter. Testing through a grape will always read wet and tells you nothing. If the surface colours before the centre is set, lay a sheet of foil loosely over the tin for the final 10 minutes. An internal temperature of 205°F (96°C) at the middle confirms it.
Cool in the tin, then release
Leave the cake in the tin on a rack for at least 40 minutes before releasing the ring, and for a full 2 hours before cutting. This cake is structurally fragile while hot, because the grapes are still full of boiling juice and the crumb around them has not set. Cutting early drags fruit through the slice and leaves a smeared face. Once cool, run a thin knife around the ring, release it and slide the cake off the parchment onto a board.
Whip the lemon mascarpone cream
Whisk the cold mascarpone briefly on its own to loosen it, then add the cold cream, the powdered sugar, the lemon zest and the lemon juice and whisk only until it holds a soft peak that folds over on itself. Mascarpone is already close to churned butter in fat content and it splits into grains very quickly if you keep the whisk going, so stop early and finish by hand if in doubt. Keep it refrigerated and whisk it once more, gently, before it goes onto the plates.
Plating
Bertolina is cut in squares or wedges and eaten in the hand at the festival, and any plating has to respect that it is a country cake rather than a pastry. Cut portions with a thin bladed knife warmed under hot water and wiped dry between cuts, sawing rather than pressing, so the grapes are sliced through instead of dragged. Serve the slices at room temperature, never chilled, because cold mutes the labrusca perfume that is the entire point of the fruit.
Set the slice slightly off centre on a plain plate, with the cut face towards the diner so the burst grapes are visible in section. Add a generous quenelle of the lemon mascarpone cream beside it rather than on top, where it would slide off the crust and take the sugar with it. Warm the slice for 8 minutes at 300°F (150°C) if you want the contrast of warm cake against cold cream, and let it stand a minute before it leaves the pass.
Finish with a few fresh uva fragola left whole beside the cream and, if the grapes were sweet enough to spare it, a very small amount of grated lemon zest over the cream only. Nothing else belongs on this plate. No sauce, no dusting of cocoa, no mint. The cake is dark, the cream is white, the whole grapes are glossy, and that is already the whole composition.
Professional Technique
Every technical decision in this recipe is dictated by the fruit rather than by the batter. Uva fragola is about eighty percent water by weight, its skin is thin and slips easily from the pulp, and once the cake passes 160°F (71°C) the cells rupture and each grape becomes a small reservoir of hot sweet juice inside a batter that has not yet set. A conventional cake batter cannot cope with that: it either bakes around the fruit and traps the liquid in a wet ring, or it is aerated so lightly that the grapes sink through it and compact on the base. The answer used in Crema is a batter deliberately built somewhere between a cake and a plumcake, dense with flour and with melted rather than creamed butter, so that it has absorbent capacity instead of aeration.
The flour dusting on the grapes is the second half of the same idea and it works on contact. A dry film of starch on the skin gelatinises the instant juice reaches it and forms a thickened sleeve around each grape, which both grips the surrounding batter and slows the release. It is the reason the fruit stays distributed through the height of the cake rather than sitting in a layer at the bottom, and it costs thirty seconds. Skipping it is the single most common cause of a failed Bertolina, and no amount of extra baking will repair the result.
The pips are a technical element too, not merely a tradition to be tolerated. Grape seeds are rich in condensed tannins and in the oven they contribute a faint astringency and a very slight bitterness that cut the sugar in the fruit and in the crust. That is why a Bertolina made with seedless table grapes tastes flat and simply sweet even when the recipe is otherwise identical. The trade off is texture: diners who are not expecting seeds will find them, so the cake should be described honestly when it is served. In Crema this is never an issue, because everyone already knows.
Texture and Moisture Control
The target texture is a damp, close, slightly chewy crumb carrying pockets of collapsed fruit, with a thin crisp sugar crust on top and no free liquid anywhere. Moisture is the whole battle, and most of it is fought before the cake goes into the oven. Grapes dried properly after rinsing, dusted with flour, folded rather than stirred and baked in the lower third of the oven will release their juice gradually into a batter that can absorb it. Any shortcut at those four points shows up as a translucent wet band in the finished slice.
Oven position and heat matter more here than in an ordinary cake. The lower third gives strong base heat, which sets the underside early and stops the heavy fruit from compacting into a sodden layer, while a moderate 350°F (175°C) avoids driving the top crust into colour before the middle has set. If your oven runs hot or has a fierce top element, drop to 340°F (171°C) and add 5 minutes rather than covering the cake early, since foil laid on too soon traps steam and softens the sugar crust you have just built.
Cooling is the final moisture control step and it is entirely passive. As the cake falls to room temperature, the juice still held inside the burst grapes migrates outwards into the crumb and is reabsorbed, which is why a Bertolina that seemed wet at 30 minutes will be perfect at 2 hours. Never refrigerate it to speed this up: cold firms the butter, dulls the aroma and drives condensation onto the sugar crust, turning it sticky within the hour. Room temperature, uncovered, on a rack, is the only correct way to cool it.
Professional Mise en Place
This is a short recipe with one fragile window, the twenty minutes between mixing the batter and closing the oven door, so the fruit and the tin must be completely ready before the eggs are touched. In a restaurant the cake is baked in the morning and served all day, with only the cream made close to service.
Equipment and tools
Springform tin, 9 in (23 cm), buttered with the base lined in parchment
Balloon whisk and a wide flexible spatula, no stand mixer needed for the batter
Fine sieve for the flour and the baking powder
Digital probe thermometer for the butter and for the centre of the cake
Thin bladed slicing knife and a jug of hot water for portioning
Prepared ahead
Grapes picked off the stems, washed and dried, up to 4 hours ahead, kept in a single layer on a towel
Dry ingredients weighed and sifted together, the night before if convenient
Tin buttered and lined, held at room temperature
Cake baked in the morning and cooled uncovered on a rack, best eaten the same day
Lemon mascarpone cream whipped up to 6 hours ahead and kept cold in a piping bag
Service setup
Cake held at room temperature on a board, cut to order rather than pre sliced
Small oven or salamander set to 300°F (150°C) if slices are served warm
Cream in its bag over ice, given one gentle stir before each quenelle
A handful of whole uva fragola held cold for the garnish, brought out just before plating
Knife in hot water and a clean cloth at the pass, wiped between every cut
Chef Tips
Buy the grapes on the day you bake and taste one before anything else. Uva fragola goes over quickly, and a bunch that has been in a warm shop for three days ferments faintly at the stem end, which carries straight into the cake as a sour note behind the sugar. The fruit should smell of strawberry from a hand span away and the skins should be tight.
If you genuinely cannot find uva fragola, small Concord grapes are the same labrusca family and behave almost identically in the oven, though they need a fraction less sugar in the batter. Ordinary seedless table grapes are a different proposition entirely, with thick skins, high water and no perfume, and the honest thing is to bake something else instead.
Weigh the flour rather than measuring it by volume if you have a scale. This batter sits in a narrow band: 20 g of extra flour turns the crumb dry and bready against all that fruit, and 20 g too little leaves it unable to hold the juice. Of every variable in the recipe, the flour weight is the one that moves the result most.
Bake it the day it is eaten and accept that it will not keep like a plumcake. Bertolina is at its peak from about 3 hours after it leaves the oven until the end of that evening, when the crust is still crisp and the crumb has just finished absorbing the juice. By the following afternoon the top has softened, and while the cake is still good it is no longer the same thing.
Common Mistakes
Using seedless table grapes. The pips carry the tannin that balances the sugar, and the labrusca skins carry the perfume, so a cake made from ordinary seedless fruit is simply sweet and vaguely grapey. If the strawberry grape is out of season, wait for it rather than substituting.
Baking the grapes wet. Fruit that goes in still carrying rinse water dilutes the batter it touches and bakes into grey soggy channels. Dry the grapes properly on a towel, turning them so the stem dimple empties.
Skipping the flour dusting. Undusted grapes release their juice straight into a fluid batter and sink through it, which gives a dense wet base and a pale dry top. A tablespoon of flour turned through the fruit prevents both.
Stirring the grapes into the batter. Every stroke past the fifth breaks skins that should stay intact until the oven. Fold slowly with a spatula, and stop while the distribution is merely even rather than perfect.
Testing the cake through a grape. A skewer pushed into fruit comes out wet no matter how well baked the cake is, which sends cooks back for another ten minutes and produces a dry crumb. Test in the batter between two grapes, or take the centre to 205°F (96°C).
Cutting it warm. The crumb has no structure while the grapes are still boiling inside it, and an early slice drags fruit across the face and collapses. Two hours on a rack is not optional.
Refrigerating the finished cake. Cold sets the butter hard, mutes the aroma that justifies the whole recipe and turns the sugar crust sticky with condensation. Keep it at room temperature under a cloth.
Wine Pairing
Moscato di Scanzo DOCG: The most local answer on the list, from Scanzorosciate just outside Bergamo, an hour from Crema and made by drying Moscato di Scanzo grapes on racks before pressing. Its sweetness is restrained and its perfume is rose, dried fig and sage rather than raw sugar, which lets it meet the labrusca aroma head on instead of being buried by it. There is enough tannin in a red passito of this kind to answer the grape pips in the cake.
Sangue di Giuda dell'Oltrepò Pavese DOC: Sweet, lightly sparkling and red, from southern Lombardy, and closer in spirit to this cake than any serious dessert wine could be. The frothy carbon dioxide lifts the fat of the mascarpone cream off the palate, the moderate alcohol keeps the pairing from becoming heavy after a generous slice, and its own blackberry and violet fruit sits naturally alongside the strawberry grape. This is the bottle a Cremasco family would actually open.
Brachetto d'Acqui DOCG: A Piedmontese aromatic red with very low alcohol and a nose of rose petal and wild strawberry, which is almost a description of uva fragola itself. Serve it at 50°F (10°C) so the perfume stays fresh and the sweetness reads as fruit rather than syrup. Where Sangue di Giuda echoes the cake, Brachetto amplifies it, and it flatters the burst caramelised grapes on the crust in particular.
Moscato d'Asti DOCG: The safe choice when a table is mixed, and a genuinely good one here. Its 5 percent alcohol and gentle frizzante make no demands after a meal, while the acidity behind the sweetness keeps cutting back through the mascarpone cream slice after slice. The white peach and orange blossom aromatics contrast with the musky fruit in the cake rather than mirroring it, which some diners prefer.
Recioto di Soave DOCG: The choice for anyone who wants a still, structured, properly sweet wine. Garganega dried on mats gives candied apricot, almond and acacia honey with an unusually firm line of acidity for a passito, and that acidity is what stops the pairing collapsing under the sugar of the crust. Pour it in small measures at 54°F (12°C): it is considerably richer than the cake and a large glass will dominate.
Storage & Reheating
Keep the cake at room temperature, loosely covered with a clean cloth or a cake dome that is not airtight, for up to 2 days. An airtight box is the wrong container for this one: the fruit continues to give off moisture for many hours and a sealed lid returns it all to the sugar crust, which goes tacky overnight. The crumb stays pleasant through the second day even as the top softens, and by the third it has turned noticeably damp and is best used for the oven treatment described below rather than served plain.
Refrigeration is not recommended for the cake itself, since cold butter and cold labrusca fruit together give a dull, waxy slice, but it is essential for the lemon mascarpone cream, which keeps covered in the refrigerator for up to 2 days and should be whisked briefly by hand before use. The cake freezes acceptably in slices, wrapped first in parchment and then in foil, for up to 1 month. Thaw the slices still wrapped at room temperature for about 2 hours; unwrapping them frozen deposits condensation directly on the crust.
To revive a slice, warm it uncovered at 300°F (150°C) for 8 to 10 minutes on a rack rather than on a solid tray, so the base dries as the top crisps. A frozen and thawed slice takes 12 minutes. Never use a microwave: it heats the water inside the grapes far faster than the crumb around them, and the fruit bursts a second time into a crumb that has no absorbent capacity left, which produces a slice that is scalding, wet and grey in a matter of seconds.
Nutrition
Per serving, based on 8 slices with a quenelle of lemon mascarpone cream:
Calories: 470 kcal
Total Fat: 25 g
Saturated Fat: 15 g
Trans Fat: 0.6 g
Unsaturated Fat: 8 g
Cholesterol: 115 mg
Sodium: 260 mg
Total Carbohydrates: 55 g
Fiber: 1.5 g
Total Sugars: 32 g
Added Sugars: 22 g
Protein: 7 g
Lactose: 2.6 g
Principal micronutrients: manganese, vitamin K, vitamin A, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, and the polyphenols carried by the grape skins and seeds
These figures are estimates. The sugar total moves most with the ripeness of the fruit, since uva fragola at the end of the season can carry a third more sugar than the same grapes picked two weeks earlier, and the fat figure assumes the full quantity of cream is served with every slice.
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