GINA DePALMA
Gina DePalma, chef and writer.
Sweets queen
16-9-1966 – 29-12-2015
New York pastry chef Gina DePalma is sometimes mentioned in recipes that are not hers. "Based on a recipe from Gina DePalma's book Dolce Italiano: Desserts From the Babbo Kitchen" is a credit cooks may find attached, indicative of the influence that dePalma's tome has had in the kitchen since publication in 2007.
DePalma, who has died of ovarian cancer at 49, credited her Italian immigrant mother and grandmother for teaching her not only how to cook but also how to think about food. "Use what is local, use what is available, and use ingredients to their fullest potential," was her mantra. Her sweet ideal was panna cotta, a study in minimalism.
DePalma's reverence for simplicity kept her on the margins of the New York pastry scene until she met Mario Batali, the chef and owner of the restaurant Po. While she was making desserts at the Cub Room, he paid her a visit and presented his idea for a new restaurant, which he envisioned as a shrine to rustic Italian cooking. "It was a concept of dessert that was entirely familiar to me," she said. Batali hired her an hour after they met.
When Babbo opened in 1998, DePalma was the pastry chef, turning out chocolate polenta tarts, strawberries in Chianti with black pepper and ricotta cream, and the dessert that became her signature, saffron panna cotta with poached peaches. "It is like the restaurant itself: an unusual combination of ingredients that seem destined to be together," wrote one reviewer in 1998.
DePalma prized flavor above eye appeal and took a dim view of extravagance.
"It is always my goal to create desserts that just make sense," she wrote in her cookbook.
"I feel very strongly and quite personally that desserts should not be an object of whimsy or nonsense." At the same time, many of her most successful desserts included an inventive spin, often on American ideas, like Thanksgiving cranberry tart in a polenta crust.
In 2008, Bon Appétit magazine named her best pastry chef of the year. Said DePalma: "You might look at one of my plates and think, 'Wow, she really just slaps it on there'. But when there isn't all that busy-ness to distract the eye, the beauty of the actual food itself has to shine through."
Gina DePalma was born New York, and grew up in Fairfax, Virginia. She began cooking with her mother, she wrote on her website, "as soon as I could stand on a stool." After graduating from the College of New Rochelle with a bachelor's degree in political science, DePalma worked as a cook and caterer to earn money for law school, but after five years, the kitchen won out. She enrolled in Peter Kump's New York Cooking School (now the Institute of Culinary Education) and found a job as a private chef for the actor Michael Douglas.
While serving a pastry apprenticeship at Chanterelle, the pioneering French restaurant in TriBeCa, she "drifted to the sweet side of the kitchen" and joined the pastry team at Gramercy Tavern under Claudia Fleming, one of the leading lights in a new generation of chefs elevating the status of dessert.
"I have a very different philosophy for dessert than many pastry chefs,"said DePalma, "because I never received that spun-sugar, highly crafted technique of pastry — I was trained as a chef. The best way I can describe my desserts is that they're very food-oriented