Pastry Chef Letitia Clark Celebrates the Sweet Life, Italian-Style

Letitia Clark’s grandmother ate sugar with everything: stirred into orange juice, heaped onto cereal, piled over fresh fruit. She’d dunk the white cubes into coffee and spoon them into Clark’s mouth “for grit,” and she always kept an emergency tin of biscuits by her bed. Naturally, Clark grew up to be a pastry chef.

Her second cookbook, La Vita È Dolce, is a collection of Italian-inspired sweets dedicated to this granny. Out July 20, it’s a story that only Clark, a French-trained chef from Devon, England, who has called Sardinia home for the last four years, can tell.

Being an immigrant, Clark writes, is like being a cream bun, split right in two. On one side is her old home, on the other is her new home, and the cream in the middle — the food she cooks to fill the space in her heart between England and Italy — is something else entirely.

The 80-plus recipes in La Vita È Dolce are the cream, you might say. Some are as Italian as it gets (Sicilian cannoli, Tuscan torta della nonna, country-wide apple cake), while others recall treats from Clark’s past: Roman maritozzi remind her of hot-cross buns, and sbriciolata (which Clark describes as a giant crumble pie) is as rubbly as her favorite English pudding.

“It’s funny, you sort of realize how important your food heritage is once you move away from it. I’m incredibly sentimental about English food, my food memories in England, and the things I used to eat growing up,” says Clark, also a food writer and illustrator.

Her love for Sardinia beams in her work, both in La Vita È Dolce and her first cookbook, Bitter Honey. Her favorite things about the island — the language, the people’s pride for their cuisine, the intense hues of the freshest fruits and brightly painted buildings — have come to influence her cooking just as much as her English upbringing. (She’d rather not go without butter or cream, though, so one of the cookbook’s signature Clark-isms is a liberal use of dairy where Italians might use olive oil or lard.)

“My relationship with Sardinia has changed incredibly over the four years that I’ve been here, and I’m sure it will continue to change,” Clark says. “It’s like any relationship. It matures, maybe it’s less ‘Whoa, passionate,’ but it’s still love. Even if I live here for 40 years, it will never completely lose the romance.”

One of the joys of being an expat, Clark says, is appreciating the similarities between her two homes as frequently as the differences. When her Sardinian friends reminisce about the Kinder chocolates and Mulino Bianco cookies they ate as children, she thinks of Kellogg’s cereal and McVitie’s biscuits and remembers that “we’re all the same deep down. We all fall in love with these cheesy brands and their cheesy adverts and over-sugared products.”

While savory Italian food is beloved for its minimalism, the country’s desserts are often quite the opposite, extravagant in their ornamentation, Clark points out. Dolci like Sicilian cassata, with its green marzipan cloak, swirls of white icing, and jewels of candied fruit, are “a celebration of the arrival of sugar in Italy, introduced by the Arabs and then cultivated in Sicily from as early as the 9^th century.”

Fittingly, La Vita È Dolce will teach you how to celebrate special occasions like an Italian pasticcere, intricately glazing Sardinian capigliette (lemon-scented almond tartlets) and laboring over pastiera Napoletana, a four-day project involving farro, ricotta, and candied orange baked into one “enormously rewarding” tart.

For cooks who don’t aspire to win awards for their artistry but still want something decadent, her mix-it-and-forget-it desserts, like chocolate mascarpone ice cream and rosemary olive-oil-and-yogurt cake, should do the trick.

“I love messy cooking,” Clark says. “Sometimes you’ll eat this perfect tart with this very thin crust, and then other times you’ll eat a tart that’s been made by someone’s grandma in a rush, and it’s a bit thick and scruffy and craggy, and oftentimes it’ll be more delicious.”

If Clark’s own grandmother were here to cook from the book, she says, she would probably long for the tiramisu, cappuccino panna cotta, and coffee and brown sugar granita, as she loved all things creamy and coffee-flavored. Her granny used to pour herself a coffee after every meal, a habit far more Italian than English; it was her grandmother who first sent Clark to study in Italy.

“I think she would have been thrilled to be mentioned in a book that talked about Italy,” Clark says. “She just thought it was the most romantic place in the world, the cherry on the cake of civilization.”