Torta pasqualina

The story

Genoa's Easter pie layers chard, fresh cheese and whole eggs between sheets of olive-oil pastry. Its forerunners appear early in Italian cookbooks: in the 1400s Maestro Martino of Como wrote of Genoese tarts of spinach or onions, and in the 1500s Bartolomeo Scappi described vegetable pies called gattafure. According to the Italian food site Gazzetta del Gusto, the name pasqualina took hold in the 1700s for the layered pie made for Easter. Tradition says the pastry should have 33 layers, one for each year of Christ's life. That count is probably legend; in 1930 the Genoese journalist Giovanni Ansaldo wrote of a pie of 24 layers, and most cooks today use 8 to 10. The cheese is prescinsêua, a tangy fresh curd recorded around Noli and Albenga since the 1200s and 1300s; a Genoese law of 1413 even listed it among possible gifts to the Doge. In Genoa the pie belongs on the Easter table, served with quagliata, and every slice reveals a baked whole egg. Easter falls on March 28 in 2027. Bake the pie the day before: it slices cleanly at room temperature and needs only a green salad beside it.