Pasquetta, “Little Easter” or Easter Monday in English, is as important a holiday in Italy as Easter itself, with the difference being that you generally spend Easter with family around the dining room table, while on Easter Monday you head fuori porta (meaning “outside the gates” aka out of town) with friends for a picnic.
When we lived in the center of Rome, not wanting to deal with Roman traffic, we usually headed on foot up to the park on the Gianicolo, a hill overlooking the town affording peaceful surroundings and a spectacular view of the city. Debatable whether that counted as fuori porta. Yes, the Gianicolo lies outside the ancient city walls, but today it is very much inside the city limits. In any event, it made for a pleasant outing. Once we moved to a small villa just outside Rome along the via Ardeatina, we contented ourselves with a cookout in our garden, joined by picnickers from the city who settled their baskets and blankets in the nearby fields. Fond memories, those…
On our Easter Monday menu were the usual salumi (cured meats) and cheeses and such. But savory pies were a fixture, too. Here are three lovely savory pies you can serve as an antipasto on Easter itself or, if you’re observing. on the Monday:
Pizza rustica (Easter Cheese and Salumi Pie)
Pizza rustica, literally ‘rustic pie’, is a savory concoction of flake pastry crust with a filling of eggs, cheese and cured meats. It’s a kind of simple country cousin to the more elaborate casatiello. The pizza rustica is much better known abroad, and is much appreciated by Italian-Americans. Of course, whether or not you celebrate Easter Monday, a pizza rustica is equally at home as a starter on the Easter Sunday dinner table.
The only part of this recipe that’s a bit tricky, at least for non-bakers like myself, is the crust. This version uses a crust made from a pasta sfoglia, usually translated into English as puff pastry, made from flour and lard, mixed with just enough water to bring things together. It needs careful handling—not too much kneading, which would develop the glutens and produce a tough crust. And the high fat content means the dough needs to be kept cold or it will quickly become unworkable. Having said that, it’s not as difficult as it may sound. Hey, if I can do it, you can.
Torta Pasqualina (Easter Pie from Liguria)
La torta pasqualina or, “Easter Pie” is traditionally made from multiple layers of ultrathin dough—legend has it 33, one for each year of Christ’s life, although seven or eight are more usual—these days time-pressed home cooks like myself might opt for phyllo dough or, as presented in the recipe, puff pastry.
The stuffing is made from Swiss chard or spinach or both, scented with onion and nutmeg and perhaps other spices, over which a slightly tart Ligurian cream cheese called prescinseua is laid. (In my recipe, I’ve simulated prescineua by mixing ricotta and Greek yogurt.) Eggs are gently placed into wells in the stuffing, and it’s all topped with another layer of pastry and finally baked in the oven until golden brown. Simple though it is, the taste is amazing and the various layers of the filling are quite attractive as you cut into it, especially if you catch a bit of egg yolk.
Torta pasqualina can be eaten over the course of several days after it is made. If you serve it at Easter, leftovers make for a lovely picnic food for Easter Monday.
Casatiello (Neapolitan Easter Bread)
One of my fondest taste memories from my childhood was a bread we used to call “Anzogna bread” (anzogna, I am told, is a dialect word for lard). My grandparents would buy it at a local bakery in the Italian neighborhood they lived in. These days, sadly, it’s very hard to find. Italian bakeries prefer to sell “prosciutto bread”, which I guess they feel it fancier and more marketable. Too bad, because it is nowhere near as delicious.
Later in life I realized that it was a relation, perhaps not so distant, of a Neapolitan bread made with lard and pork cracklings called tortano con i cicoli, and belonged to a family of lard-enriched donut-shaped breads common to Neapolitan cuisine. Perhaps the most famous of these lard-enriched breads is casatiello, a Neapolitan Easter bread, which is distinguished from its sisters by the eggs embedded on top and topped with crosses made from dough.
Casatiello is stuffed with an assortment of cured pork and cheeses (the particular mix varies from recipe to recipe) and baked until golden brown in the oven. Served as an antipasto for Easter dinner, the leftovers taste ever better eaten the next day, as part of the traditional Easter Monday picnic.
It’s a bit late for Easter but I’m going to try the torta rustica for my next picnic.
what a wonderful selection of Easter treats Frank! I have just finished to make the Umbrian Torta di Pasqua for tomorrows' traditional Easter breakfast. Buona Pasqua e Buon Appetito!