A Green Pie For Spring
And In Praise of Stagioni by Olivia Cavalli
If your spirits need lifting and your body feels in need of some minerally greens, may I suggest this celebratory Italian pie studded with eggs (AKA Torta Pasqualina)? It’s so much easier than it looks and the process is very soothing before you even get to the eating part.
I made this pie for lunch on Easter Day, before the lamb. I’d been wanting to make one of these Easter pies for years and it was a conversation with writer Ro Corradin at the Women in Food event in Sicily a few weeks ago that finally convinced me to do it. Ro told me that at her home in Sicily, she makes one of these Easter pies every year with vast armfuls of foraged wild greens.
Even though I only had shop-bought greens, the reality of the pie was actually even better than I’d expected. There is something about the sight of the yolks as you cut into the pie that cannot fail to cheer (assuming you like eggs). But what I liked even more was the richness of the ricotta and Parmesan against the refreshing greens. It was both like and not like the variations on spanakopita which I have been making for years.You need to know that it was something that people ate third and even fourth helpings of.
This pie felt so celebratory, both in the making and the eating that I wanted to share it with you, even though Easter is over and even though it hasn’t been long since I gave you another recipe for my more workaday spinach filo pie. But this torta is a pie you could make all spring long from any greens you find at the market (or at the bottom of your salad drawer as the case may be). In Liguria, where the pie originates, it is sometimes made from ‘preboggion’: a mixture of wild herbs including various herbs plus things like borage and dandelion. Almost any green leaf will do and bitterness is welcome.
What made our Easter torta extra special was that we were eating it with my friend Faraj Alnasser, a Syrian chef, who features in my book THE HEART-SHAPED TIN in the chapter called ‘The Vegetable Corers’ which is about how some very unassuming-looking metal Syrian tools for removing the insides of aubergines and courgettes have become a symbol of home for Faraj. These corers represent a peaceful Aleppo which Faraj and his family had to leave after the civil war started in 2011.
I had a last-minute panic about the cheese in the pie, knowing that Faraj, who is Muslim, only eats halal meat. I wrote to him to check whether I should use some kind of vegetarian substitute or just leave the cheese out altogether and he made my heart sing when he replied: ‘I LOVE Parmesan, it’s like a cheesy hug from heaven! So, no veggie substitute for me, please. I’d rather stage a protest with a fork and a wedge of real Parm’. This was a relief because I was planning on adding obscene amounts of cheese to the pie (and indeed, I think that it was the delicate cheesiness of the filling that made people reach for a second and third sliver).
The recipe was very slightly adapted from one of my favourite recent cookbooks of recent years, STAGIONI: Contemporary Italian Cooking to Celebrate The Seasons by Olivia Cavalli. I feel it’s one that deserves to be much better known. I am comforted every time I return to it.
I often think that instead of reviewing cookbooks the year they come out, we should wait and review them a year or two later: only then do you know which are the real ‘keepers’, the ones that get used again and again until the pages are splattered with butter and smudged with herbs. For me, STAGIONI - a collection of seasonal Italian recipes, mostly vegetarian but with a bit of pancetta here and there - is one of those essential cookbooks which has woven itself into my life. On first glance, when it was published in 2022, I could see that STAGIONI was beautifully photographed and pleasingly structured with some lovely stories about Italian home cooking in the headnotes. But I had no idea how much I would still be cooking from it four years on.
Simplicity is famously one of the hardest things to pull off when it comes to cooking . STAGIONI is full of recipes just the kind of simple Italian food I’d happily eat any day. Many of the dishes come from Olivia’s Italian Nonna who used to ‘eyeball’ things in the kitchen, never relying on written recipes. STAGIONI is a perfect mixture of deceptively basic-looking recipes such as a dish of braised borloti beans with salsa verde and more involved projects such as Timballo di Melanzane (Aubergine Pasta Bake).
Even the more elaborate recipes in STAGIONI have a rare kind of ease and joy to them. The Torta Pasqualina is a case in point. Traditional recipes for this pie, as Olivia points out, call for a hand-made oil and water pastry ‘rolled exceedingly thin, making 33 sheets to symbolise the years of Christ’s life’. But she recommends buying filo ‘for time and sanity’s sake’. I am all in favour of sanity in the kitchen. Yet there is no compromise on taste. There is a far higher ratio of ricotta and Parmesan to greens in the STAGIONI version of the pie than in most of the other Torta Pasqualinas I found, which lends it a suave richness. The main change I made was to add some rocket to the filling alongside the spinach and Swiss Chard for a touch of bitterness; and also some lemon because I find myself wanting to add lemon to almost everything.
This book has started to keep me company through each passing season to the point where some of the recipes have become rituals. When autumn comes around with its golden light, I find myself returning to Olivia’s golden saffron risotto with braised fennel (maybe the best fennel recipe I’ve ever tasted) and on cold winter evenings, I crave her beetroot tart with ricotta pastry. And next spring, I suspect I will find myself gravitating back towards this green pie with its sunny yolks, like green shoots towards the sun.
An Italian Green Pie for Spring AKA Torta Pasqualina
