Torta Pasqualina (Easter Pie from Liguria)

Frank15 April 2017Liguria, Spring, starters/antipasti40 Comments

Savory pies and enriched breads figure prominently on the Easter dinner table. We’ve already featured a couple Neapolitan examples on the blog: the casatiello and the incredibly rich pizza rustica. Today we head north to Liguria to present another classic savory pie served around Easter time: la torta pasqualina or, “Easter Pie”. Traditionally made from multiple layers of ultrathin dough—legend has it 33, one for each year of Christ’s life, although seven or eight are more usual—these days time-pressed home cooks like myself might opt for phyllo dough or, as presented here, puff pastry.

The stuffing is made from Swiss chard or spinach or both, scented with onion and nutmeg and perhaps other spices, over which a slightly tart Ligurian cream cheese called prescinseua is laid. (Here we have simulated prescineua by mixing ricotta and Greek yogurt.) Eggs are gently placed into wells in the stuffing, and it’s all topped with another layer of pastry and finally baked in the oven until golden brown. Simple though it is, the taste is amazing and the various layers of the filling are quite attractive as you cut into it, especially if you catch a bit of egg yolk.

Torta pasqualina can be eaten over the course of several days after it is made. Leftovers make for a lovely picnic food for Easter Monday.

Ingredients

Serves 6 or more as an antipasto

2 sheets of puff pastry (see Notes)

For the greens:

500g (1 lb) Swiss chard and/or spinach
1 onion, finely minced
Olive oil
A sprig of marjoram
A pinch of nutmeg and/or cloves
Salt and pepper

For the rest of the filling:

250g (3-1/2 oz) well-drained ricotta cheese
250g (3-1/2 oz) Greek yogurt
50g (2 oz) grated Parmesan cheese
4-5 eggs
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Optional:

A beaten egg yolk (for brushing)

Directions

Wash the greens well and trim off any large stems, then parboil them for a few minute, just until they have wilted. Drain, squeeze dry and roughly chop them.

Sauté the onion in a skillet with a generous glug of olive oil until it is soft and translucent. Add the chopped greens and let them wilt, mixing all the time so they become impregnated with the flavor of the soffritto. Strip the leaves off the sprig of marjoram and add them to the greens, along with the nutmeg, clove, salt and pepper. Let the mixture simmer gently for a minute or two so the flavors meld. Turn off the heat and set aside to cool completely.

Mix the ricotta and Greek yogurt in a bowl, together with an egg, a healthy pinch of grated Parmesan, salt and pepper. (Some grated nutmeg or clove here, too, wouldn’t be amiss.) Set aside.

Lay one sheet of the puff pastry over a well-greased 22cm/9 inch pie plate. (The pastry should hang over the sides of the plate; you may need to roll out a store-bought sheet a bit, as I did.) Lay the greens over the bottom. Top with half of the remaining grated Parmesan cheese.

Then lay on top the ricotta and yogurt mixture. Make 3 or 4 slight depressions in the filling with a wooden spoon, then break an egg into each well.

Season with salt and pepper, sprinkle with the rest of the grated Parmesan cheese, then finally drizzle everything with some olive oil.

Lay over the second sheet of puff pastry. Trim around the edges of the pie plate, leaving an overhang of about 2cm or 1/2 inch. Now roll up the extra pastry onto the pie plate, pressing the two sheets together as you go, to form a kind of cord, like so:

As you can see, I’m no master at forming a pie crust, but it all works out in the end…

If you like, brush the puff pastry with beaten egg yolk for extra sheen.

Bake the pie in a pre-heated oven at 180C/350F for about an hour, or until the top is golden brown.

Let the torta pasqualina cool completely before serving.

Notes on torta pasqualina

If you want to simplify your life even further, do as many people do and just use ricotta rather than the ricotta and yogurt. You can, in fact, mix the ricotta, Parmesan and greens together into a smooth, even paste rather than layering it all separately. This provides a more “even” taste, not unlike the typical filling for ravioli, although the layering method is original to the dish and, to my mind, more interesting. The eggs, too, can be mixing in rather than laid on top—although that sacrifices the visual drama, too. Sometimes an egg is beaten into the ricotta to stiffen it up, even if you’re laying on whole eggs afterwards. And if you’re not partial to leafy greens, you can make torta pasqualina with sautéed artichoke hearts, the way that a Ligurian office meat of mine tells me his family makes it.

Store-bought puff pastry makes a fine crust, in my opinion, and renders the dish almost effortless. Last year I made a torta pasqualina with multiple layers of phyllo dough, top and bottom, brushing each layer with olive oil. I liked the result, though not quite as much as this year’s puff pastry version.

Last year’s torta pasqualina, made with phyllo dough and spinach and ricotta filling.

On the other hand, if you’re feeling ambitious and want the full-court-press traditional dish, you can make your own dough. It is a simple mixture of flour, salt, water and olive oil, but requires rolling out into paper thin sheets and layering each sheet with brushings of olive oil. Check out this blog post, from cyberfriend Stefano. It gives you detailed instructions on making this dough—and for the last word on making torta pasqualina in general.

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