“Do you like butter? Oh my God, I am giving you some of this butter!”
I'm perched on a stool in Jenelle Manzi’s uptown Manhattan kitchen, and before I get a chance to answer, she’s already made a graceful leap toward the fridge. She takes out a brick-sized package of Le Beurre Bordier, which she presents to me like a gift. “I brought sixteen of these back from Paris,” she confesses. “It tastes like ice cream.” I sample a teaspoon, and she’s right: The Madagascar vanilla flavor springs out of the the creamy base. It's butter you want to eat on its own.
Faux Nutella iced donuts.
This would be butter’s only appearance that evening, but Manzi, the 28-year-old veteran of the New York City Ballet, proceeded to whip up a whole lineup of treats in front of me: maple-pecan muffins, cacao squares topped with chocolate ganache, and almond-coconut bars slathered in matcha ganache. And she’s somehow mustered the energy to make all of this on a Monday evening, her only night off during the week.
Manzi is used to putting in long hours. A dancer since the age of four, Manzi went to study at the School of American Ballet at 11. “I didn’t have much of a childhood or teenage years," she says. "At one point, I was waking up at 5 a.m. and getting home at 10 p.m. after rehearsal, and I would still need to do my schoolwork.” But it was worth it: At 16 she was asked to be a part of NYCB’s corps de ballet, the backbone of company.
The NYCB's ballets use the corps a lot, Manzi tells me, so she's never been short on work. When we meet, she's at the end of a long run of shows including The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. “We’ve been going straight since September without any breaks,” she says. “But I love baking, and being in the kitchen relaxes me.”
After long hours rehearsing, Manzi gets into the kitchen to relax.
We’re soon bonding over our deep love for cheese and bread, but her affection is more theoretical since she mostly dropped gluten and dairy two years ago. “I was foggy and swollen all the time and didn’t know why,” she recalls. “We have custom-made pointe shoes and I would have to cut layers of satin just so they could fit.” She was finally diagnosed with a gluten intolerance, and while she’ll still have the occasional sampling of her favorite indulgences—on a recent trip to Paris, she ate bread, cheeses, and chocolates—when I ask if she “cheats” during the season, I get a firm, “Never.”
Manzi has always loved baking and was not about to give up desserts, so she tweaked her favorite recipes. She came up with new gluten- and dairy-free formulas using ingredients like coconut cream, chia, and a variety of wheat-free flours. She’s well aware that most gluten-free foods lack the decadence and flavor of their gluten-y counterparts, and she’s on a crusade to change that.
“I want my treats to taste just as rich and good as if they weren’t gluten and dairy free,” she says. “Food should be enjoyable. Who likes shitty anything?”
With her love of baking, Manzi is something of an outlier in the world of professional ballet. But every time she brings her desserts to rehearsals, she says, they’re gone in 20 minutes.
Manzi’s kitchen walls are lined with meticulously organized shelves housing wheat-free flours (chestnut, sweet potato, rice), at least a dozen Sun Potion and Moon Juice jars, and nuts that she dehydrated herself. The cacao powder she’s using was brought back on the same Paris trip as the butter—also in large quantity. After popping the maple-pecan muffins in the oven, she rips open a bag of crushed rose buds from beloved Middle Eastern market Kalustyan’s and begins to sift through hundreds of tiny flowers. She's looking for the perfect, driest, most vibrantly red ones to sprinkle on her cacao squares. When she turns her back to stir the chocolate that she’s tempering on the stove, I stealthily eat another matcha ganache bar.
“Eat as many as you want!” she says.
Sticky apricot bars with turmeric and bee pollen.
Manzi knows her ballet career won’t last forever. She’s in her eleventh year with the NYCB and thinking about what she’ll do next. She’ll soon have three weeks off from ballet, and she's planning on “lots of baths, reading up on herbs, a trip to L.A.”—but also a chance to think about making her baking hustle a career. She’s considering a pop-up shop or taking orders through her Instagram, which is already filled with comments like, “I see an empire in your future” and “you need to set up a booth outside of Koch theater.” When I ask about opening a bakery, she says it would make her “the happiest girl in the world.”
At the end of the night, I’m toting a bag of goodies to the subway—muffins, chocolate and matcha squares, dehydrated maple pecans, breakfast energy bars—each group living in its own pastry box, perfectly arranged.
