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.
Erica De Mane 
[…] 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. […]