The pastiera I baked for today’s dinner.
I change my recipe every year. This time around I added orange-flower water, cinnamon, vanilla, lemon zest, and, instead of the various kinds of candied fruit that are traditional, two heaping tablespoons of bitter-orange marmalade, chopped up. This beautiful smelling thing is now cooling and waiting to be transported to my mother’s on 33rd Street.
Buona Pasqua to all my skinny guinea friends.
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[...] Easter for those, like me, who have emptied themselves of Catholicism, can be a nonevent of the highest order. And here in Manhattan the weather is predictably cold, often overcast, which never adds much to the pagan springtime renewal. My bonnet is usually a pilly black beret. And my progressively more irritated family (I’m talking mainly about my mother) no longer gives a damn about Easter or any of the traditional preparations for it that seemed so carefully planned when we were kids. Big deal. I don’t really care either. I do love some of the classic Southern Italian Easter dishes, especially the ricotta-based ones—pizza rustica on the savory side, pastiera on the sweet. Those are gorgeous dishes. You can find a recipe of mine for pizza rustica on page 285 of The Flavors of Southern Italy, and one for pastiera here. [...]