Sachertorte Lied: Vienna Never Owned This Cake

By Alexandre Noir, Gastronomy & Culture Editor

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There is a moment in every serious kitchen when someone commits the most radical act available to them: they refuse the original.

Not out of ignorance. Not because they haven't tasted it, studied it, memorised its ratios. But because they have — and they've decided that what interests them is the conversation the recipe begins, not the recipe itself. Rachel Roddy understands this. She has always understood this. Her Roman kitchen, the one she writes from with such unhurried precision, is not a place of reproduction. It is a place of translation.

Her not-Sachertorte is exactly what the name claims. It does not pretend to be the real thing. It does not apologise for being something else. It is a chocolate cake that looked at Vienna, acknowledged it, and then walked in the other direction — toward a darker ganache, a looser crumb, a texture that belongs more to a Tuesday afternoon than to a hotel dining room. And in doing so, it reveals something about the Sachertorte itself that a hundred reverent reproductions never could: that the original was always an act of individual will. Franz Sacher was sixteen years old when he made it, under pressure, improvising. The thing that became an institution was born from the exact same creative desperation that Roddy is channelling now.

I think about this every time someone asks me whether it matters that a dish is "authentic." The question misunderstands what food is. Every grandmother who made rabbit stew in the Maltese countryside was improvising within a tradition — adjusting for the season, for what the butcher had, for whether the tomatoes had come in or not. The *fenkata* that exists in a Rabat household today is not the fenkata of fifty years ago. It is a living thing. The tradition is the conversation, not the fixed text.

What Roddy does — and what makes her one of the most important food writers working in English right now — is remind you that the not-version of something can be more honest than the version. Her not-Sachertorte does not carry the weight of the Hotel Sacher's legal battles, the trademark disputes, the century of arguments about whether the apricot jam goes under or inside the glaze. It carries only what she put into it: attention, chocolate of quality, and the willingness to ask what she actually wanted the thing to taste like.

Benjamina Ebuehi is doing something adjacent with her ricotta, blackberry, and lemon cake — that particular combination of fresh cheese and sharp fruit that the Mediterranean has known in various forms for centuries, dressed now in a contemporary British baking vocabulary. The ricotta does what it always does: it keeps the crumb tender without weight, carries citrus without fighting it, and reminds you that dairy at its most unprocessed is already perfect. The blackberries do what blackberries do in September — they arrive tasting of rain and the end of something, and they stain everything they touch a colour that looks almost reckless against pale batter.

My mother used to make something that had no name. Ricotta from the market in Sliema, lemon from the tree in the back, whatever fruit was threatening to turn. She would not have called it a recipe. She would have called it using what you have. Ebuehi, I think, would have approved.

And then there is the tomato question. Why bother deseeding them? The Guardian's kitchen aide column poses it as a practical matter, but I find it philosophically interesting. The seeds and their surrounding gel carry a different kind of acidity than the flesh — brighter, thinner, more volatile. When you cook them, that acid blooms and then dissipates. When you don't deseed and don't cook long enough, you can end up with a dish that tastes simultaneously sharp and watery. But when you eat a ripe tomato raw, over a sink, with salt, you want every part of it — the seeds, the gel, the barely-there resistance of the skin. Context is everything. There is no universal answer, which is the only honest answer to most cooking questions.

What connects Roddy's not-Sachertorte, Ebuehi's ricotta cake, and the humble deseeded tomato is the same thing: the willingness to ask *why* before you ask *how*. The most dangerous moment in any kitchen is when a technique becomes