Zabaione

Three ingredients, no fat, no flour, and nothing to hide behind. Zabaione is egg yolk beaten over heat until it holds air, sweetened, and loosened with fortified wine. It takes about eight minutes and cannot be left alone for any of them.

Artusi gives it at recipe 722 and specifies Marsala, which remains the standard. He also treats it as something you make for someone who is unwell, which tells you how it was thought of.

Ingredients

Serves 2.

	Metric	Imperial
Egg yolks	4	4
Caster sugar	60 g	2 oz
Marsala	60 ml	2 fl oz

The old proportion is one yolk, one half-shell of sugar, one half-shell of Marsala per person, which is a useful thing to remember and roughly what the weights above give you.

Method

1. Set a wide bowl over a pan of barely simmering water. The bowl must not touch the water.
2. Whisk the yolks and sugar in the bowl until pale, before any real heat has built up.
3. Add the Marsala and keep whisking, constantly, moving the whisk around the whole bowl rather than beating in one spot.
4. It will thin at first, then begin to thicken and climb. Keep going. It is ready when it has roughly tripled in volume and holds a ribbon on the surface for a second or two.
5. Serve at once, warm, in glasses.

What goes wrong

It scrambles. The water boiled, or the bowl touched it. Barely simmering means barely: if the water is rolling, the bowl is too hot.

It stays thin and never climbs. Not enough sustained whisking, or the heat was too low. This is an arm exercise and there is no way round it.

It collapses within a minute of serving. Slightly undercooked, so the foam had nothing holding it. Zabaione is always fragile, but it should survive being carried to the table.

Why it works

Whisking forces air into the yolks while the gentle heat partly coagulates their proteins around those bubbles. The sugar slows that coagulation, which widens the window between "foamed" and "scrambled" from almost nothing to about a minute. That is why you never add the sugar late.

At the table

Older than most of what is on this site, and it has two lives. Served warm in a glass it is a dessert, eaten with a small spoon and usually with something dry alongside to dip: savoiardi, or the hard almond biscuits of Piedmont.

Cold and set with cream it becomes a base for other things, spooned over fruit or frozen into a semifreddo. Both are correct and the warm one is older.

It also has a reputation as a restorative, given to children, invalids and the very old, which is why an Italian of a certain age will tell you their grandmother made it for them when they were ill. That is not folklore added later. It is what the dish was for in a house with eggs, sugar and a bottle of Marsala.

It has to be made to order and it does not wait, so a restaurant offering it is telling you something about its kitchen. Anything sitting ready in a fridge is a different preparation using the name.

Marsala is traditional, and a dry Marsala rather than a sweet one.

What an Italian would say

That it is Marsala and not sherry. That it is served warm rather than chilled, though a chilled set version exists and is a different thing. And in Piedmont, that it goes with dry biscuits for dipping, and that the biscuits are not optional.