Panna cotta

Cream, sugar, vanilla and just enough gelatine to hold a shape when turned out of the mould: that is the entire recipe for panna cotta, Piedmont's chilled pudding, whose name means cooked cream. It is associated with the Langhe hills around Alba and Cuneo, where it was a farmhouse dessert long before it appeared in print; the first cookbook mentions are from the 1960s, and it only became a restaurant standard outside Italy in the 1990s. Its neighbours are the French blancmange and bavarois, which use milk or add whipped cream and egg, and the Spanish and Latin American flan, which sets with eggs in the oven. Panna cotta has no eggs and never sees the oven, which is why a good one is paler, softer and purer in flavour than any of them.