Category Archives: Easter

Mar 27 2016
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Easter

Easter

Easter1970

That’s a photo of me taken on Easter morning, 1970. I remember distinctly that shirt––my grandma made it for me––and I remember distinctly that chocolate bunny. We’d have one of similar stature, solid chocolate (hollow? never!) each and every Easter. And an Easter basket, too, filled with chocolate foil eggs and jelly beans and malted eggs and more. The jelly beans would be inside paper eggs from Germany. There would also be lovely egg-shaped candles in the basket, handmade in Germany, with bunnies and flowers and chicks on them, and German wooden carved bunnies, too, in the basket with the cellophane grass.

If all that rings familiar in terms of things we sell at the Convivio Book of Days Catalog on our website, that’s because so much of that catalog is made up of favorite things I remember from my childhood. They meant a lot to me then and they mean a lot to me now, in that these are part of the ingredients, for this family at least, that helps make the ceremony of a day. Not the main ingredient, but an important ingredient nonetheless. The main ingredient is probably the love in our hearts, the doing what we do because we do it to mark occasions across time and space, to celebrate with those who have come and gone and who are here still and with those who are the future.

A couple of years back, during an Eastertide that for me was not the happiest of occasions, I awoke to find a solid chocolate bunny wrapped up and set on my front porch. My friend Frank delivered it, but it wasn’t even exactly from him; it was from a good friend of his, someone I had never even met. I still haven’t met him. But that delivery is a gesture I will probably always remember. A good example of that love in our hearts and doing what we do to celebrate these days, each and every one of them.

May that love be yours, too. A very happy Easter to you and yours. Hopefully this spring morning you woke up to a few good surprises, too.

 

Apr 04 2015
3 Comments
Easter, Easter Triduum, Good Friday, Holy Week, Lent

Buona Pasqua

LaFellata

Come noon on Holy Saturday, that is today, lent is over. Or so this was the tradition in my grandparents’ home. The day before was Good Friday and my mother recalls that on Good Friday, the home was in a state of mourning, as if there was a wake going on (and back then wakes took place in the home). “You couldn’t turn on the radio,” she says. “You couldn’t even step on the cracks of the sidewalk.” She doesn’t remember whose rule that was, but it was, nonetheless, a Good Friday rule for my mom as a little girl.

But by noon on Holy Saturday, the mood shifted to one of preparation for the next day’s big feast. In their home, the Easter meal was usually lamb: chunks of it braised on the stove with garlic and onion, then mixed with spring dandelion greens, scrambled egg and parsley and grated parmesan cheese. In their dialect from Lucera the dish was called spetsada (and I’m not sure of the spelling, considering this is not true Italian). The lamb and the eggs bring important symbolism to the Easter table, foods we take in that tell the story of spring’s renewal through subtle hints of sacrifice and resurrection.

At Grandma Cutrone’s table, the meal was typically a fancy pasta dish like ravioli. And this typically is what our Easter table holds, too. The ravioli are always homemade and that part of the meal is always preceded by a special Easter antipasto called la fellata. It begins with a large platter (we like abundance, so the larger the better!). First on the platter are paper thin slices of salami and prosciutto, and atop them, rounds of pepperoni and soppresata, sliced hard boiled eggs, wedges of sharp provolone and slices of fresh mozzarella. In the very center goes an Italian basket cheese, which we usually call “cheese in the basket,” but just as my grandparents all spoke their particular dialects of the Italian language, even “basket cheese” seems like a sort of Italian-American dialect. Its proper Italian name might be canestrato, but basket cheese seems its most prevalent name, and the name comes from the cheese being formed inside a basket––once reed but now most often plastic––so that the impression of the basket is apparent in the finished cheese once it is removed from the basket and placed on the table. Sometimes, if the platter is just too close to overflowing, we might place the fresh mozzarella and the basket cheese in a platter of their own. If your fellata is to be truly delicious, you’ll procure all of these items from a good Italian market, rather than from the supermarket. (When’s the last time you had good fresh mozzarella from the supermarket?)

What separates Grandma Cutrone’s version of la fellata from that of my mother’s family is the addition of sliced oranges. Perhaps they began as leftovers from Grandma Cutrone’s St. Joseph’s Day altar in March, for she always placed baskets of oranges at her altar for St. Joseph. No matter how or why, the sliced oranges brighten the platter. They are cut in thick rounds with one slice from the center out to the peel, so that the orange sections can be pulled apart into a big toothy grin. And of course colored eggs and baskets of the taralli that were the focus of the last chapter of the Book of Days. (I included a recipe for taralli there should you be looking for a good Holy Saturday project.)

Getting through the meal at the Easter table at our house takes hours. Like the Easter Vigil Mass that begins at sundown tonight, it is an occasion not for the faint of heart. It is an event for which one brings a hearty appetite for food and for life. And as we toast each other at that table so we toast you: Buona Pasqua a tutti!

 

Apr 20 2014
1 Comment
Easter

The Easter Table

Fellata

When you get right down to it, each holiday in our home revolves around food, and the foods on the table at Easter are some of the most celebratory of the year, coming as Easter does on the heels of Lent and all its spareness. Things begin with a first course that features a plate called La Fellata, an antipasto of sorts. It is a platter layered with slices of salami and prosciutto, wedges of sharp provolone, rounds of pepperoni and soppresata, and topped with orange slices. The oranges are cut in a special way: sliced so they are full round circles, and then a cut is made from the center of the orange out to the peel at just one point, so that the orange can be pulled apart at that cut so the orange sections open into a toothy grin, much like a jack o’lantern might have.

The fellata is always accompanied by fresh mozzarella and, perhaps most important, homemade taralli, which you might think of as an Italian pretzel flavored with wine and fennel seeds and black pepper.

Eggs! Of course there are eggs: hard boiled and dyed, and they are there to be eaten with this first course, but you don’t just crack and peel them. No, first and foremost they are used in egg fights, in which folks at the table are pitted against each other to see whose eggs are strongest when one person’s egg is used to tap the other’s. The eggs that break first are the first to be eaten.

The fellata is delicious and more fun than you’d expect a holiday meal should be. And here’s what happens after the fellata every single year: someone says, “Let’s skip the ravioli and move on to the basket course.” Which, of course, means the Easter basket, chock full of malted eggs and solid chocolate bunnies and jellybeans. But to skip the ravioli would be sacrilege. And already the water is boiling on the stove, and the ravioli that were made by hand the day before are ready to be tossed into the pot and served up with a light tomato sauce. A formality just to get to that anticipated basket course? Perhaps. It is the same story year after year, wonderful and delicious. Buona Pasqua a tutti! Happy Easter to all!

 

Image: The makings of a perfect fellata plate, complete with taralli.

 

 

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