Easter Sunday

by: Simona Carini

The little girl with big green eyes looks up at the middle-aged woman. The woman gives to the girl a small cake, a baked bowler hat without brim, its rounded top covered with egg white icing dotted with colored sprinkles. The little girl's face melts into a smile, her big eyes a deep pool of crystalline joy. She places her small hands around the side of the cake and carries it like a sacred trophy to the dining room table, where a plate is ready to receive it.

"Dad, will you please cut me a slice? Aunt Lucia made this for me." The father accedes to the request, smiling. The little girl walks to her seat holding a plate with a golden slice reclining on it. The middle-aged woman looks at the scene and she, too, smiles at the little girl's joy.

In the center of the table there is a bigger version of the little girl's cake, emanating a faint smell of sweetness and orange peel. This cake has no icing, and its rounded top, dark brown and smooth, has the surface tension of a bubble about to burst. Next to the cake, six hard-boiled eggs, shelled, glisten in a bowl, and a plate is covered with thin slices of "lonza," gossamer threads of fat drawing delicate decorations on the deep purple pork meat. But the little girl's greedy green eyes are fixed on another plate, holding half of an immaculately white truncated cone.

"Mom, will you please give me some ricotta?"

The mother cuts a slice of the soft cheese and deposits it on the little girl's slice of cake, without smiling. The result is a geometrically precise pairing of the two foods. Using both hands, the little girl raises the combination to her lips, then closes her eyes and mouth around the first morsel. The ricotta, cool, creamy and dense, immediately takes center stage, while the cake, crumbly, slightly dry and vaguely sweet, acts as supporting cast. A whole year of expectation finds complete satisfaction in small bite after small bite of gustative bliss, while the rest of the scene is swallowed into oblivion.

Afterwards, sitting next to her aunt in one of the wooden pews of the cold church of St. Nicholas, bathed in the fragrance of a myriad flowers, the little girl is so content that the village priest preaching seemingly endlessly about human frailty and downright wickedness has no power to ruffle the inner peace manifested in her serene green eyes.

This episode recurred almost exactly in every detail several times during my childhood. On Holy Thursday my family would travel from Perugia to Poggio Catino, my father's native village, to celebrate Easter with my Aunt Lucia, who lived in the house where she, her three cousins and her half-brother (my father) had grown up. On Easter Sunday, before going to Holy Mass, we would have breakfast together: it was the only day of the year when the whole family sat down at the table for the earliest meal of the day. The tension between my parents and the animosity between my mother and my aunt were there the whole time, as tangible as the sweet-smelling cakes and the richly embroidered tablecloth. For a brief half hour, however, I was able to push aside the perennial dark cloud and enjoy my favorite meal of the year under an almost clear sky.

The foods on the table were Easter traditions. The small cake I received was called "palombella" (little dove) and its bigger version "pizza di Pasqua" (Easter bread). My Aunt Lucia, like her mother, her stepmother and the women from previous generations, would make the palombella and several "pizze" using the family recipe and would bake them in the public wood-burning oven the village used to have. My father would tell me how, on Easter's eve, the village women flocked to the oven with their pizze. The tension was palpable when the baker started to take out of the oven the sweet-smelling pizze and the result of each woman's efforts were perforce submitted to public evaluation. A cake that had not risen well above the rim of the pan and whose top was not rounded like a diminutive dome and smooth like a tight drumhead was perceived as an indelible blot on the maker's name. My father always ended his story by telling me that my grandmother's pizze di Pasqua were perfect, which filled me with grand-daughterly pride.

The pizze were baked in special copper pans that usually hung on the kitchen wall facing the fireplace and were not used for any other purpose, because they represented the only relics of a once copious heritage. My aunt would describe to me the dizzying array of pots and pans of all shapes and sizes that furnished the kitchen when she was a child, the combined dowries of the two women who had married my grandfather and his brother. The two families lived in the same spacious house, at first for convenience and later because they merged, when my widowed grandfather married his brother's widow. Most of the household's metal treasures were melted during World War II, when Italian women were asked by Il Duce to sacrifice their metal possessions to help the war effort. Copper pots and pans, wrought-iron beds and wedding rings were eagerly offered, hastily melted and promptly wasted. A few kitchen pieces were spared, like a "conca," the hourglass-shaped container my grandmother filled with drinking water at the public fountain and then hoisted on her head to carry back home, the ladle used to take water out of the conca, a teapot that my mother used, filled with hot water, to shower my brother and me before we had the water heater installed in the house, and the set of pans used to bake the pizze di Pasqua.

The closure of the public oven put an end to my aunt's baking and erased the palombella from the Easter picture of my teen age years. We still had pizza di Pasqua for breakfast, but it was produced by the Brothers Giusti bakery in Casperia, the village where my mother grew up, only five miles away, but inhabited, according to my father, by people of a completely different race, whose most notable trait was that they never smiled. Although it was good, the pizza di Pasqua from the bakery did not taste like my aunt's palombella. Lighter in texture and paler in color, it was a washed-out version of what my eyes and taste buds had learned to expect. It did not smile.

After I moved out of my parents' house in my early 20's, I stopped celebrating Easter with my family and my aunt. Back then, it felt good not to have my time measured by traditional celebrations, and renouncing the special breakfast seemed like a fair price to pay for the newly acquired freedom. Nostalgia for what was one of my favorite foods, however, has been nibbling at me ever since.

As I try to mold into words what my senses remember, twenty more years have passed and other changes have occurred. I never asked my aunt for her recipe for the pizza di Pasqua, probably because I thought I could always do it later. Now it is too late. The pans for the pizza di Pasqua, unused after the village oven closed down, have been collecting dust in the silence of the kitchen since my aunt passed away almost four years ago. Ricotta made with sheep milk by the sheepherders living a few miles from the village belongs to a world I left behind. I still have, however, my sensory memories, into which family stories are woven seamlessly. I honor these memories by telling them, and in the telling I am as joyful as the little girl with the big green eyes relishing her favorite food of the year. I know that my aunt is looking at the scene, smiling.