It’s Christmas Eve when I help my aunt unload five reusable bags full of vintage cookbooks out of my car. A “9th Grand National Cookbook,” a 1968 “Foods of the Word,” Julia Child’s “The French Chef Cookbook” (which looks more like a common paperback than a cookbook), Marcella Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook” and a spiral-bound “Salute to Italy: Celebrity Cookbook” copyrighted to JCPenney in 1984.
Holding my nana’s battered, red-and-white gingham copy of a “Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book,” her etchings alongside the margins, I cried.
Nana was an avid home cook. My father remembers coming home to mounds of flour waiting to become pasta on her giant wooden cutting board. He remembers seeing a wok for the first time in her kitchen, alongside dim sum cookbooks — some of which I have since inherited. My most precious memories with her include standing in her Florida kitchen, rolling pizza dough between my palms before dropping them in boiling hot oil and dousing with cinnamon and sugar.
But my nana was also from an Italian family and of the tradition where family recipes were passed down only to the eldest daughters. Being my father’s daughter, I do not have access to the recipes that not only flavored my childhood, but my dad’s. This gift from my aunt felt like a treasure trove; as if somewhere within the discolored, glue-failing pages, I might find a fuller version of the woman I once knew.
Every Easter, I bake my father— and my family — ricotta pie. It’s not even my nana’s most famous recipe (that would be her ever-elusive half-moon pastry cookies stuffed with nuts and chocolate and Concord grapes that my father used to hand peel after every Naples Grape Festival), but it’s a tradition my dad remembers fondly.
It’s experimental; trial-and-error I commit myself to each year with the hopes of getting it right. Stumbling into a recipe and food memory I do not have. But this year, I have her cookbooks. Even still, the recipes are all over the place. In “Salute to Italy,” actress Sophia Loren shares her recipe that includes lemon rind, golden raisins, and pine nuts. “The Italian Collection” by Food & Wine Books calls it a Sicilian Ricotta Cheesecake (my Nana was not Sicilian, but Abruzzese) and theirs doesn’t have a crust, but uses cinnamon in lue of lemon, which rings more true to my nana’s version recalled by my aunt. Lidia Matticchio Bastianich includes hulled wheat kernels and orange water in her recipe.
A week before my father and I plan to bake ricotta pie, he has intense surgery on his right arm, complete with a full-arm hardcast and a bright yellow foam protector he has to wear whenever he eats so as to not move the healing break. Which means our baking day turns more into a my baking day, trying to pull my father away from the living room to guide.
The first step is to make the crust, an Italian pastry dough with cold butter cut into the flour as well as eggs and baking powder and sugar. It’s the filling that’s altered every time. This time, I mix the ricotta, eggs, sugar and vanilla before calling my father over. Together, we eyeball the cinnamon — probably much like my nana would have.
“Your cinnamon is too fine.”
“Did you know cinnamon is from the dried bark of a tree?”
“When did you find that out?”
“I don’t know, a couple years ago. At a museum.”
“What tree is it from?”
“Cinnamon?”
With every shake of the plastic bottle, he mixes the filling one-handed. When the scent of cinnamon lingers above the bowl and the mixture looks like a starry night, we stop. I pour the batter in and get started on the lattice top. It’s the first time I’ve ever done one for the ricotta pie, but both my aunt and father insist nana’s had it.
Where maybe, typically, we would have reminisced about nana — her job at the bank that used to be in the Times Square building downtown, her mind for math and business, the kindness she routinely showed my mother — we mostly laughed. Laughed about my cheaping out for the storebrand ricotta, laughed about my dad trying to whisk with one hand, laughed about my fiance not quite achieving my father’s artistic vision for the photographs.
Sooner or later, I think we forgot this was all for an article. Instead, we fell into step in the kitchen. My parents, my fiance and myself, all standing around the island as I worked on top of a large cutting board my father purchased because it reminded him of his mother — those childhood days when he ran in from school and watched her prepare dinner. Our practice became less about revisiting the past, more about the braiding together of inherited stories as we crafted new ones, too.
When we finally took the pie out and the cheesecake-like center had time to settle, I gave each of us a slice. I brought my father his in a shallow bowl with a fork, and set it on the table next to his chair. With one hand, he took the bowl and rested it on a pillow.
“I feel like it’s eggy,” I said about my first bite. It was soft and not too sweet, the perfect amount of cinnamon. But this is our dance: The first test when I learn what to tweak and try again for next year, when I tap into my father’s memories and try to get closer to his version of the nana I knew.
“No, it’s good,” he says, instead. In his casualness, in the lack of feedback, I know it must be like hers. The closest I’ve ever gotten. “It’s just not Polly-O ricotta.”
Find ricotta pie at a handful of local spots each Easter season: Rubino’s, Leo’s Bakery, Savoia Pastry Shoppe (which uses cracked wheat, much like Lidia’s) and Forno Tony all offer their takes on the Italian classic.
Jessica L. Pavia is an English teacher and freelance culture writer from Rochester. She’s interested in the small moments and niche interests that make us who we are.
