Italian Easter Specialities

Buona Pasqua! 

Happy Easter!

Philadelphia's 9th Street Italian Market

I love eggs and chocolate, which makes Easter one of my favorite culinary holidays. There are the large Italian chocolate eggs filled with a surprise gift (or more chocolate) and the decorated hard-boiled eggs. And of course we can't forget the sweet, almond colomba cake. Maybe these treats taste even better because you're "allowed" to eat them first thing in the morning (it isn't just because I'm pregnant and want to eat everything all the time.)

This year we picked up our Italian chocolate eggs in Philadelphia's 9th Street Italian Market. Among the pasta shops, butchers, spice and cheese stores, the Italian groceries were filled with Italian chocolate eggs and colomba cakes for the upcoming holidays. Compared to what I've seen in New York, New Jersey and D.C., the prices were great, too.

Let's see if I can wait until Sunday to open up one of the three eggs we bought. 

Buona Pasqua! Happy Easter!

Gigantic Italian Chocolate Easter Egg (and some extra cookies)

I can't visit The Italian Store without picking up my favorite cheeses: 

Fresh mozzarella, fresh ricotta, Tuscan pecorino and smoked scamorza

This is orzo (barley) coffee, which is naturally decaf.

This brand is marketed to your child (bimbo), 

since, of course, he wants to drink coffee with the adults.

Easter, like St. Joseph's Day, calls for a special trip to The Italian Store in Arlington, Va. After living in Italy, Easter isn't complete without a giant chocolate Easter egg or a Colomba cake. Two years ago I had a lot of fun making an Egg and Swiss Chard Pie, which I might try again. And, of course, I'll be dyeing eggs to decorate them (and eat egg salad sandwiches for a few days.)

What are your favorite Easter traditions and where do you find your favorite specialties or ingredients?

Italian Easter Traditions

Easter wouldn’t be complete without a Colomba, a cake (loosely) in the shape of a dove, or a giant chocolate egg with surprises inside. 

I’ve always purchased both in Italian stores, but there are recipes available online for the Colomba.

Looking for more? Last year I wrote about preparing an Easter Pie and hard boiling eggs - perfectly.

Buona Pasqua! Onto preparing the shopping list for this weekend…

Egg & Swiss Chard Pie

I believe in using holidays as an excuse to eat a dish, but not limiting certain dishes to a prescribed day. If it is yummy, why wait?

I made this Egg & Swiss Chard Pie (a traditional Italian Easter Pie called Torta Pasqualina) for Easter this year and don’t intend to wait another year to make it again.

I followed the recipe in the Silver Spoon Cookbook. I admit that I’d never eaten it before, so I can’t exactly claim it as my own tradition. That said, it was delicious. With prepared puff pastry dough, Swiss chard, ricotta and eggs broken into the middle of the filling, it was also a dish that attracted attention.

What are your favorite holiday dishes that you make throughout the year?

Perfect Hard Boiled Egg

Hard boiled eggs aren’t only for Easter. They also make great salads and additions to green leaf salads.

When I was growing up, we always carefully lowered cold eggs into boiling water. Many of the eggs inevitably cracked and leaked into the boiling water. Oopla!

The current, popular method is to heat the water with the room eggs already in the pot. By leaving the eggs in the water, their international temperature raises with the water temperature and they are less likely to crack. For more detailed instructions, see these very clear instructions.

And then what do you do with the many eggs you’ve perfectly boiled? I like to eat them whole with a little salt sprinkled on top. You can always make a great egg salad, like this Curried Egg Salad, which is where most of our Easter eggs ended up this year.

Natural Easter Egg Dye

I am hesitant to share this, but since I promised a few folks I would, I figured I should follow through.

This Easter (I know, it is long-past), I tried to make all natural egg dyes. I boiled onion skins (for yellow), beets (for red), and spinach (for green). I poured dark coffee (for brown) and red grape juice (for purple) into glasses. I mixed the colored liquids with white vinegar and placed hard boiled eggs in the mixtures.

And then my husband and I waited. We checked on the mostly-still-white eggs and waited some more. The eggs barely retained the color. The brown was goopy and started to peel off. The other colors, which seemed dark in the glasses, barely had an effect on the eggs.

In the end, we decided to use the back-up, chemical dyes. Within minutes we had brilliantly colored eggs. We knew that the all natural dyes would result in lighter, more matte colors, but we barely even achieved that.

I’m not sure what happened. I researched the process online and followed what seemed to be standard recipes.

For readers who make their own dyes, what’s the trick?

Upcoming Holiday Menus: Passover & Easter

I remember my grandfather hiding the matza under cushions on Passover. While it was always a messy discovery, I enjoying eating the remaining (boxed) salted matza smeared with butter. Every Easter, my mother and I would decorate hard boiled eggs with dyes, crayons, markers, stamps and anything else she found in her studio that could be used on an egg.

Nostalgia, family, tradition and food are what comes to mind when we think of holidays. As a new family, my husband and I are actively creating new holiday traditions for ourselves. My contribution tends to be planning the menu too far in advance. Luckily, he’s happy to not only discuss the menu, but also try out some dishes ahead of time.

Passover, starting March 30th, and Easter on April 4th, are close. What are your favorite dishes served on Passover or Easter? Have you already thought about what you’ll serve?

As many of you know, historically Italy had a vibrant and active Jewish population. I’ve been reading Edda Servi Machlin’s cookbook Classic Italian Jewish Cooking looking for inspiration for Passover dishes. Her descriptions of the town where her family originated, Pitigliano in Tuscany, was known as “The Little Jerusalem.” She describes her family’s history as it was connected to the history of the Jewish population in this town and throughout Italy. As for her recipes, she’s the perfect, accessible source for any chef interested in trying new dishes.

Many of her recipes are familiar because of their dual traditional influences. For example, we’ve eaten Jellied Striped Bass (much like gefilte fish patties) and Tomato Bread Soup Peasant Style (papa al pomodoro). The interesting part is how the recipes differ from the recipes we might already follow.

I look forward to trying many new dishes. I’m intrigued by her Spinach and Ricotta Pancakes as well as the Marinated Squash Flowers. I haven’t tried any yet, but they are easy to read and seem easy to follow. I enjoyed the beginning chapters that describe the ingredients and how to use them. I know I’ll be following her instructions on how to prepare an artichoke the next time I make them Roman Jewish Style.