Every April, my grandma Antoinette Chirichella set up her kitchen to prepare her Easter pies. Nettie, as her family and friends called her, took great pride in her classic holiday creation.
Known variously as pizza chiena, pizzagina and pizza rustica, the pie has roots in Southern Italian culture. Usually it’s savory, filled with eggs, mozzarella, provolone, ricotta, prosciutto and sausage. Every family has its own recipe and every family believes its recipe to be the best.
As with other families, our making of the pies was a tradition passed down from generation to generation. Our recipe originated with Nettie’s mother, Elvira.
It was a family affair helping grandma Nettie shop for ingredients weeks before Easter. Aunts, uncles and cousins piled into her Williamsburg kitchen to form an assembly line of sorts. One person kneaded the dough, another chopped and sliced and still others rolled the pie crusts and crammed in the filling. After hours of prep, into the old large oven would go six or seven pies at a time — eventually dozens in all, including tiny versions for the children — to be baked a crispy golden brown.
My grandma would start final preparations early on Holy Saturday morning. Relatives would start filtering in around 12, because no meat could be eaten until you heard the noon church bells gong.
Once finished, the pies would be set on the bed to cool, with the windows left wide open. The church bells would toll, signaling for a family member to grab the largest pie and make the first cut. Everyone always said that the first steaming hot bite from that first pie — the pie you waited a whole year to taste — was the most delicious.
By mid-afternoon, with the meal consumed and the kitchen cleaned, the relatives would get ready to head home. Ah, but first my grandma wrapped the still-warm pies still left over in foil, each labeled with the handwritten name of a family member or friend designated as a lucky recipient.
Over the next few days she would also hand out the pies to neighbors and co-workers in the factory where she operated a sewing machine for 47 years. Always she kept some pies in her refrigerator and freezer to be enjoyed on special occasions later on.
My mother, starting at age 8, would help make the pies. She would do a little chopping and a little filling and was usually in charge of brushing egg wash on the finished pies to create a lovely sheen.
Every Easter, the pattern of shopping, cooking and eating repeated itself. By the time my brother and I came along, my grandmother decided it was too much work for my mother to come over with small children, and so she made the pies by herself.
Nettie passed away in 1999. We went to her apartment to organize her belongings and opened her freezer. There, buried deep in the back, were several of her Easter pies. One was labeled “Nettie.” We took that one home with us and placed it in our freezer.
For years I practically begged my mother to try to recreate the pies, but she never wanted to do it herself. But a few years ago we resurrected the tradition and made the pies together. We now bake my grandmother’s pies in my house in Southern Italy, near the town where my grandmother’s father was born.
We laugh and cry, my mother and I, as we make the pies and reminisce about my grandmother and try to do justice to her recipe. We see her face and hear her voice and smell her perfume, proof that food has a special power to reconnect us with those we’ve loved and lost. We do all this in my kitchen, where my grandmother’s hand-written recipe for the pies, saved from decades ago and now beautifully framed and proudly displayed, watches over us.
Then we eat the pies and, with that first bite, cry all over again. This year, my 7-month-old daughter Lucia will be there with us in the kitchen. Her middle name is Antonia, in honor of my grandma. Maybe in time, she, too, will be inspired to follow her recipe.
Chirichella is a former New Yorker now living and working in Italy as a chef and freelance writer.
