Hello, and welcome to Savor Protection of iHeartRadio. I'm Anny Reese.
And I'm Lauren Vogelbaum, and today we have an episode for you about Pasqualina.
Yes, any particular reason this was on your mind?
Lord, Yes, it's an Easter thing, and Easter is rapidly approaching as we record this.
Yes, it is. I have never heard of this, but it looks delicious.
Oh it looks I've never had it, but I had heard about it, and I the cravings, the cravings. Yeah, yeah, I'm mad that I'm not eating it right now.
It's pretty striking, like the it's beautiful, the cross sections. Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. Well, listeners right in if you've had it, if you have any recipes for it. Also, this is going to be a bit of fun with pronunciation, but we're going to do our best. Yeah.
Yeah. Part of the issue is that I'm kind of bouncing back and forth between Italian and Spanish, and I only know one of those languages at all, and I know that both of them have very similar sounds, but not always the same.
So here we are, Here, we are. We're gonna do our best. For past episodes, we have done Egg adjacent things, but not eggs, right.
Yes, yes, you're correct there, Yes, all.
Right, we have done deviled eggs, Easter eggs, Kisha, that's an older one, but we share. Yeah, meat pies and.
Ricata yeah yeah, yogurt, sure, yeah, yogurt.
Uh huh. Well, I guess that brings us to our question for sure. Pasqualina? What is it?
Well, a pasqualina, often formally called a pasqualina, is a type of savory pie made up of cheeses, fine chopped greens, and whole cracked eggs that come out hard boiled when they're baked in their double pastry crust. Different regions, and I mean, you know, like neighborhoods and families have different traditions about how like flaky versus bready the crust should be, what types of greens and cheeses you use, what other seasonings go in there, how towering the pie should be.
But you're basically looking at a rich and tender and filling pie that's vegetarian and not very fussy, but still
feels like a special occasion food. And indeed, it is often served at holiday feast type meals, especially Easter and surrounding holidays, it's the kind of thing that, again I haven't had it, but from what I am understanding here, it's the kind of thing that tastes like light and sort of spring timey, but it's really satisfying, like the sensation of plopping down on a sunny hill top after a nice brisk walk. Yeah, the great things I know,
I know, all right. So this is originally an Italian dish. The word pasqualina comes from the Italian for easter pascua, which itself comes from the Hebrew for passover pissak, which I didn't know anyway. Torta technically means cake, but yes, we're talking about a pie here. So the crust is most traditionally a philo type dough, like thin sheets of flour and water, rolled out and brushed with oil, and then stacked several sheets high, the idea being that they
crisp up all golden and flaky in the oven. I have seen variations like using puff pastry or something more like a tender flaky pie crust, or something more like doe or bready. I can't tell you what to do, and I wouldn't ever, I would not unless you're about to poison yourself. And then I would be like probably not that. The greens are traditionally either sharred or baby artichokes, chopped small and cooked down until they're soft before adding
them to the pie. However, any in seasoned greens can be used as long as they're like hardy enough to stand up to being cooked. You know, you don't want mush in there. You do want to squish as much moisture out of them before adding them in because you don't want the crust to get soggy during baking. The cheese is very traditionally this Genoan fresh cheese called Prussian sewa that I had never heard of, but it's apparently like tart and fine grained and kind of fluffy, soft, spreadable.
If you can't get a hold of that, and you probably cannot outside of Genoa, folks often substitute in a mixture of ricotta and maybe yogurt or crem fresh or something like that. Adding some whist egg will help the cheese day fluffy in the oven. Some recipes do call for draining the dairy before you use it. Some recipes will add extra richness and texture from other cheeses, like maybe grated parmesan or mozzarella, and some recipes call for your greens and your cheese to be mixed together in
the pie crust. Some call for separate layers. Both sound delicious. I can't tell you what to do. Seasonings to all of this might include, you know, the traditional like salt and pepper and ground nutmeg and sauteed onions chopped up fine and or perhaps boulder. Additions like garlic, cuman, bacon,
or maybe sweet or spicy peppers fresh or dried. Those are more common in the South American diaspora, but people do all kinds of things, like I saw a recipe with a layer of liver patie in it, which sounds amazing, but okay, yeah, right, Also I put this in the seasonings, but it's kind of fifty to fifty. So I've seen several recipes that use bread crumbs either in the filling mix or spread along the bottom of the crust, and
that's also to help prevent sogginess. But yeah, it's kind of a seasoning, depending on how you do your bread crumbs, I don't know. And then you've got those those whole eggs, so you make little indents in the top of the filling, and then crack the whole egg, like a whole egg into each indent around the pie. Like the idea being that when you slice the finished pie, you get a cross section of egg in each slice, which is just real pretty against the green of the greens.
Yeah.
I've never seen it without a top. Crust y'all ride in let me know.
Yeah.
Different variations have it baked anywhere from like really tall in a spring form to kind of mid range and a pie pan or cast iron skillet to almost flat like a gallet but with a full top. Yeah, it can be eaten warm or cool. I've seen recommendations to eat it cool the next day because it kind of like all the flavors have time to meld. And I've seen it listed as like a brunch or lunch or dinner.
It is associated with the Easter, but can frequently be found in cafes and from like street vendors anytime of the year.
Yeah, it sounds good. And I also saw a lot of warnings of like, let it why don't you take it out of the other one? Oh?
Yeah, yeah, let it cool and set up first, because you don't want to, Yeah, because otherwise it'll all fall apart. Immediately. Absolutely, we don't want that. No, no, no, absolutely not. Well what about the nutrition, h depends on what you put into it, but I mean, generally speaking, like that's a good punch of fiber, a good punch of protein. Like you're you're you're, you're giving yourself a really solid base.
I mean, you know, if a lot of Philo dough and cheese is a treat, then treats are nice.
They are, and this one sounds like a nice treat.
Indeed it does, despite that we have zero numbers for you.
Sorry. Yeah, it's very I mean it's it's one of those things that is both very regional. It has gone other places, but just yeah, people aren't really collecting numbers on it.
Yeah, it hasn't really gone like quote unquote mainstream enough outside of like Argentina and Yuguay and Genoa for there to be really big international numbers and attention to it.
So yeah, yeah, it was funny because I was sometimes when you don't come up with as many resources as you want, you know, you try all these other terms. And I looked up easter pie because I was like, okay, sure, and I found a Sicilian one that's completely different and very meat based, but I'm assuming they're related. But yeah, I think it's just very fragmented. But okay, that being said, we do have some history for you, Oh.
We do, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from a quick break for a word from our.
Sponsors, and we're back. Thank you sponsor, Yes, thank you. All right.
So, the history of meat pies are so sort of savory filling in cased in dough traces back to ancient times, perhaps even to ancient Mesopotamia, and it makes sense because it's convenient food to travel with or eat on the go. Instances of pies like this existed in ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece, for example. The more modern version of the Italian pie that torta, likely came up in the courts of Naples, perhaps with influence from similar things in French cuisine.
From there, torte, which is the plural, spread across the country with all sorts of federations. Since they were convenient and could be made cheaply, they were popular amongst people who worked in the Italian countryside and for those who didn't have a lot of resources. Torte were filling and they could stretch over multiple meals and feed multiple people, and torta pasqualina comes from this tradition, which, by the way, like just looking at the pictures, it does look really filling.
Oh yeah, like I said, gould fill me up good sturdy spinach and cheese pie with eggs in it?
Are you kidding?
Yeah? Absolutely. There was also likely influence from the century's long presence of North African Muslims and parts of Spain, Portugal, and Italy. They brought with them a lot of crops and dishes that changed the culinary landscape. We've talked about this a lot before. One theory is that one of the dishes they brought with them, the savory meat pie sambusak, directly influenced the creation of torta pascadina. But all right.
Most sources suggest that pascodina was invented in the sixteenth century or maybe the fifteenth century, in the northwestern region of Italy known as the Guria, possibly in the capital of Genoa specifically. At the time, the region couldn't grow a lot of wheat, and buying some from the outside was expensive. With what they had, people typically used one pound of flour to make a thin dough that was
good for torte. For the filling, meat was often expensive, so people would use local vegetables like mushrooms, spinach, fennel, leak, sartochoke shard, and maybe eggs if they had chicken, cheese if they could get it. So these are the ingredients we're seeing it, yeah, come together. The history of torta pascalina is pretty sparse, but there are some popular legends.
There's one main one. One of the most frequently repeated versions is that women from the region created this dish with thirty three layers of thin dough to represent the thirty three years of Jesus's life, traditionally ten on the bottom and twenty three on the top. It was this savory pie with hard bowled eggs twelve around the edges and one in the middle to represent Jesus in the twelve decidleles, a type of fresh cheese, fresh spring vegetables
like spinach, shorter artichokes, and spices like marjoram. It was a very springtime dish. It had a lot of symbolism. It made it perfect for Easter celebrations. Again, some people have gone back and forth about this but from when I read, it was often eaten cold and was good for picnics. While it wasn't necessarily expensive, it was more time consuming than your usual torte, and it was perfect for the endoflence and an important celebration like Easter in
a largely Catholic country. And it also just looks good. It just looks It's pretty. Yeah, it's nice looking, all right. So very brief breakdown on some of the early ingredients. Lauren already touched on some of this earlier. They could all be their own episodes, some of them have already been. But yeah, briefly for the dairy pristin Sewa, which is that acidic fresh cheese local to Laguria, was most likely used.
A very quick search suggest it first appeared in the historical record in the fourteenth century, though it was likely way older. You know on our cheese episodes. Oh my goodness. However, this cheese was and remains, from what I understand, really difficult to find outside of the region, so other cheeses were subbed in it if folks can find it, like ricotta that was a popular one, sometimes mixed with yogurt.
Yeah, because it is such a fresh cheese, right, it doesn't like really travel that well, so.
Exactly the green vegetable part is a little more difficult to pin down, at least traditionally, but I read that it was shard or spinach or artichokes, all of which were growing in Italy by this point. Whatever green spring vegetable that they had access to, I would imagine, let's put it in there. As far as seasonings went, the early versions of this dish probably included a mix of star anis, carowet seed, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, and coriander, and
then eggs. We've talked about this before, but at the time Catholics were not supposed to consume eggs during lint. At the same time, you can't exactly tell a chicken to stop playing eggs, so people ended up with a lot of eggs come spring and at the end of lint. Meanwhile, eggs were often symbolic for things like rejuvenation and rebirth, which was a great fit both for the coming of spring and the religious reason of the season for the Easter celebration, the rebirth of Christ. So it's a very
symbolic dish. It did remain pretty regional for a while, but It spread throughout Italy and parts of Europe, with folks coming up with their own takes of it based on what they had. Bartolomeo Scapi wrote about Torta pasquardina in his fifteen seventy cook book, but by the nineteenth century, the primary cookbooks about Ligurian cooking made no mention of this dish needing to have the thirty three layers. They mentioned it, but not the thirty three layers.
Yeah, it's one of those popular legends. It's hard to say whether anyone was actually ever doing that, or if it's just a nice story. It's hard to say at any rate. In the early nineteen hundreds there was a lot of immigration from Italy and Spain as well to places like Argentina and Uruguay with the rise of fascism in Europe, so there are traditions around Pascalina there as well. By the late like nineteen thirties or so, the dish was like pretty entrenched in those areas.
Yes, these days people tend to use less layers and less eggs. A lot of the articles I read were like, just whatever layers, it's okay, do four to seven. I don't know. Whatever you're up to. Yeah, exactly, but some do still make it the traditional way, including traditional cooking methods. I've read that or was a festival where people did it until nineteen ninety four and they'll just died off. And those who who do do it worry that the tradition will soon be lost, like no one's going to
keep doing this anymore. But it does sound really good.
Yeah, yeah, right, yeah, I'm like, I'm like, where can I go to either find some or can I psych myself up to make some? The question always, but yeah, if y'all have any experience with it, or if you went to a festival about it back in the day.
We would love to hear about that.
We absolutely would. But that's what we have to say about Pasquald enough for now it is.
We do already have some listener mail for you, though, and we are going to get into that as soon as we get back from one more quick break for a word from our sponsors, and we're back.
Thank you, sponsor, Yes, thank you, and we're back with.
This May every time.
Yeah.
Yes, Sarah wrote, Hello from northern California, wine and wheat Country. I don't have any fun stories to tell you, but I have a book recommendation I think is super interesting, and I'm including cute pet photos just because the book is Hippie Food, How Back to the Landers, Long hairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat? By Jonathan Coffman.
It traces the social history of natural and health food movements from early twentieth century Los Angeles to macrobiotics, to organic and farm to table restaurants to plant based raw food or fasting slash juicing movements that are feel startingly similar to this day. It's funny and insightful, and I'd love to hear you do a guest interview with the author as promised. Here are a few kitties to brighten
your day. Top photo is Frankie. Middle is Elka, eighteen years young, but who earned the nickname Elcatraz for her wild and wooly kitten antucks. And there was a third photo of Marlon Brando with his cat on his shoulder writing which, by the way, the first time I read this email, I thought you had a cat named Marlon Brando, and oh it was really funny.
That is a great name for a cat.
That would be good, But I mean these are also excellent, excellent names.
Yes, yes, absolutely, And the photos are two lovely tabby cats, both of whom look very relaxed and happy and petible.
Yes, but I can see the chaos lying in wait.
Oh always that.
It's just understood.
Yeah. In between the end of our history section and the listener mail, I in fact had to kick my kitten out of the recording studio because there were a number of thuds that occurred and I was like, well, well, no more of that.
I don't know what just happened, but out you go. Yes, let's just nit this in the bud. But yeah, we do love we love book recommendations as well, and this sounds really interesting. I would love to trace the just kind of movements, those kind of health movements.
Oh yeah, no they are. They are also wild and wild and wooly. This is true and always always super interesting.
M thank you for paying the pet tax.
Yes, yeah, yeah, and always a book recommendation. Yeah, please give me a bigger reading list and I will maybe get to things that aren't the Hunger Games someday. Segal wrote, Israel has a tea bag conspiracy. In the nineteen sixties, there was a law in Israel that food packages cannot be sealed with staples. That was because sometimes the staples fell into the food. Strangely enough, that was also applied
to tea bags even though they're not opened. This allowed an Israeli tea company named Wzotski to take over the market of tea in Israel. They use glue because no foreign company will change its packaging for such a small market.
In nineteen nineties, there was a request to change the standard, but the Wotski lobbyists were able to get it denied, and in nineteen ninety six it got all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court where it was reversed, and since then the tea market was opened to other packaging and companies. The sad thing is that Wazotski still controls the market because Israelis are used to buying it, so you'll find less varieties and less companies in Israeli stie. As a tea lover, I make it a habit to
buy anything but Wazotski and explore other kinds. Now to gafilter Fish. Gafilter Fish always brings me to the memories of my grandmother Anya, who passed away in twenty twenty two at the age of ninety six, even though she grew up in the Soviet Union, who oppressed Jews and Jewish culture. There were two Jewish cuisine dishes she knew how to make, gafilter fish and mutza balls, which she
also puts some chicken inside. And we waited for the New Year and Passover to eat the kafilter fish, which she made the traditional way, meaning she filled the fish with its meat and cooked it like this. My uncle always ate the head of the fish. Now my aunt is making experiments of making it, so we're hopeful, and whenever we eat the store bought my mom's partner, who's of Yemenite descent so didn't grow up on this, says, oh,
but the gafilter fish your mother made. I guess we'll never have the good ones anymore, but will miss her like she deserves to be missed. Now to flavors, My theory of why store bought gafilter fish is so bad is that it sits in the jar in the carrot juice, so when you eat it, all you can taste is carrot. Another thing about the taste is that there are differences between the Polish Jews who make the gafilter fish and the horse radish sweet and the Russian Jews who make it spicy to hot.
There was a yuck with the.
Sweet one and a yum with the spicy one in there to close, the stories about making the horse radish for passover always sound more like a drug.
Lab than a kitchen.
Yeah that's if y'all have never grated fresh horse radish. This is an accurate statement. It is that the fumes are quite strong and you really have to mitigate them for your own safety. Oh oh, but I love I love that your grandma made the stuffed gaffilter fish.
That's so cool.
I had never heard of that before I did the reading.
For that episode. Yeah, that is really cool. And you know it's sad that you won't maybe have it that way again, but the memory lives on.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
Yeah. May her memory be a blessing. Absolutely, Yes, Oh, good mats of I've never heard of putting chicken inside of Matza balls, And now I'm like, why have I? Well, I haven't I done that. Why don't you put a little bit of good bold chicken inside of a Matza ball?
That sounds delicious, That sounds absolutely delicious, And as someone who's never had any jarred goafil to fish, I think your theory sounds. I think it sound.
Yeah, yeah, right.
And there's texture things that wind up when you when you just have something sitting in liquid like that for too long. There's yeah.
I also have to say I've never thought about tea bags as much as I have during and after we did that episode. But now some of you have written in things about like just the way they work, the engineering, and I've just never considered it before. But this makes sense to me too, Like there's just different ways. We've already read some of the listener mail about how tea bags look in different countries.
I love that there was a regulation about it. That's yeah, because of the staple, which hypothetically isn't going to loosen. I mean you would notice, you would notice if you would have to strain a number of things out of your tea if the tea bags opened, if like the staple came loose.
Yeah, but I you know, safety is great.
I don't know it's true, it's true, but keep those keep those coming in listeners. I'm really enjoying hearing about the t bag situation in other countries, the tea bag situation. Yes, yes, absolutely yes. Well in the meantime, thanks to both of those listeners for writing in. If you would like to write to us, you can. Our email is Hello at saborpod dot com.
We're also on social media. You can find us on Instagram and blue Sky at saber Pod and we do hope to hear from you. Save is production of iHeartRadio. Four more podcasts from my Heart Radio, you can visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks as always to our super producers Dylan Fagan and Andrew Howard. Thanks to you for listening, and we hope that lots more good things are coming your way.