Easter Pies

When our Italian ancestors immigrated to the United States, they usually came with next to no money in their pockets and meager belongings, sometimes just the clothes on their backs. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t carry a treasure trove with them; they brought their culture, their traditions and their recipes. These recipes couldn’t be found in cookbooks but were stored in our ancestors' heads and maybe jotted down on scraps of paper. And we are so lucky to still be enjoying many of the very dishes that were first made in the old country. In the Italian-American homes of Carroll Gardens and in the homes of those whose families first settled in Carroll Gardens before moving elsewhere, excellent examples of these beloved recipes can be found in the variety of rich Easter pies that are made this time of the year to mark the end of Lent. While we may not always give things up for Lent anymore, we still believe in indulging when it’s over.

I grew up on the top floor of 222 DeGraw Street, right on the border of Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill, and our downstairs neighbor, Rose Tringali, was a great cook. Whenever she made something delicious, the aroma would waft through the whole building. I can still remember the first time she shared her lattice-crust pizza rustica with us. This prompted my mom to try her hand at making her own pizza rustica and so the tradition began. On Good Friday, my mom and aunt would dice up mozzarella, provolone, dried sausage, and prosciutto and make a lard dough with my Aunt Tessie’s recipe—mailed to us from her house in Park Slope as there was no email or texting in those days. We kids would help out but since Good Friday is a day of fasting and abstaining from eating meat, we couldn’t even pop a morsel into our mouths; that was a real Lenten sacrifice. On Holy Saturday, we would roll out the dough, fill the pies with the eggs, meats, and diced and grated cheeses and bake them. My father would most likely have a slice on Holy Saturday but the rest of us waited until Easter Sunday. The star of the Easter table was never the pasta, the roast, the cheesecake, or the Easter candy; it was always and still is the pizza rustica.

Today, my son Matthew and I made the dough using a food processor. (Thank God for that invention!) For some reason the dough was a little tacky this year and I had to keep adding flour but I’m confident that the lard will ensure it tastes just fine. My sister Cristina chopped up all the cheeses at her house in Manalapan and I chopped the meats that my husband picked up from Caputo's Fine Foods. Tomorrow Cristina and my young nephew will come to Brooklyn early and we will commence with the baking. My sister Lisa started adding ricotta to her pies many years ago so we make one with ricotta for my niece Amanda and a vegetarian one for my son’s partner John but the rest are made just the way my mom made them. The house will smell as great as it did all those years ago when Rose made her pizza rustica on DeGraw Street. There is a lifetime of memories in that smell.

Pizza rustica, also called pizza gana or pizza di Pasqua, is just one type of Easter pie. My cousin Emilia makes what is called a casatiello, a Neapolitan Easter specialty often made in a deep tube pan. Also made with lard and stuffed with cheese, salami, ham, or mortadella, sometimes hard-boiled eggs, and always lots of black pepper, it is made with yeast so it rises like a bread. Some people stud the top of their casatiello with uncooked eggs which then cook in oven. It seems like a cross between a fully loaded lard bread and a pizza rustica. I’m sorry that recipe didn’t make it to my side of the family and I hope one day to have a go at making a casatiello.

In addition to those savory pies, there is also a sweet Easter pie which is called pizza grana, or grain pie in English. This is also incredibly fragrant and made with wheat berries (hence the grain), ricotta, candied fruit, vanilla, sugar, and oftentimes orange flower water, which really lends itself to the fragrance. All those ingredients are encased in a pasta frolla crust. My mom and I made grain pie twice, using my cousin Lucille’s recipe which she had written on multiple pieces of paper. What we didn’t realize was that her recipe called for cooked grain (unspecified in her copious notes), so we started out with uncooked grain. Well, the grain grew and grew and we were making pies until 1:00 a.m.! They were tasty but after a couple of years we decided that Court Pastry and Monteleone made very good pies and we already had our hands full with pizza rustica.

There are other pies you might find on Italian-American tables around the neighborhood. My neighbor Elvira gave me a delicious savory spaghetti pie last year—and as I write this, she just passed me a freshly baked pizza rustica over the wall in the backyard. Some people make escarole pie, sweet and savory with walnuts and raisins, like the late Leona Esposito from the now closed Esposito Pork Store. And my grammar school classmate Ursula’s mom, “little” Grace, used to make a scrumptious sweet spaghetti pie with angel hair pasta, sugar, eggs, milk, sambuca, orange flower water, and lemon and orange zest. I am happy to have that recipe!

I hope you can sample some of these Italian Easter specialties and that you are able to celebrate Easter or springtime with your very own traditions. I wish a Buona Pasqua to all who celebrate!