Camera Shy: My Italian Easter Tradition

I spent a weekend eating amazing food and wasn't able to take a single picture. I forgot my camera before making the three hour trek back home to visit the family for Easter. My very Italian grandparents made my favorite cultural food item of all time: Ham Pie!

This is where a picture would be very handy. You see, ham pie is hard to describe. Imagine a crust-less quiche that is twice as thick and twice as dense as a traditional quiche. It is filled with cubed pepperoni, capicola salami, ham, provolone and basket cheese. These ingredients are suspended in an egg strata that is very heavy on the eggs and very light on any dairy - this is the source of the density. Some bake these pies in traditional, round pie dishes, however my family favors the 12x18 casserole dish.

Though a point of contention, my grandparents insist that ham pie was never meant to have a crust. Other sources think otherwise.

The legend that my Grandmother tells, is that ham pie must be served on the Saturday before Easter Sunday. However, the delicious meats must be prepared and cubed on Good Friday to torment the good Catholic's soul. As practicing Catholics must abstain from eating meat on Fridays in Lent, this last Friday is both the most holy and the hardest to get through after one's resolve has been tested for 40 days. Imagine the temptation of having pound upon pound of delicious gourmet deli meat cubed on the counter in discrete nibble-sized bites. Maybe God won't notice this one little bite of capicola. Maybe I'll burn in Hell for all eternity. Oh the torment!

We also indulge in two offshoots of the ham pie family - macaroni pie and rice pie. Macaroni pie is like the vegetarian version of ham pie where the cook substitutes cooked macaroni for the meat products. (Macaroni pie is secretly my favorite. I can never admit this to my grandmother who - in a classic Italian rivalry with her sister - believes that macaroni pie is an inferior dish to serve when celebrating the holiest of holy days but begrudgingly serves it anyway.)

Rice pie, like its siblings, involves about a dozen eggs but is sweetened and filled with cooked rice. Because my grandmother is from Naples and Neapolitan cooks like to put dried fruit in almost anything, she makes two pans of rice pie, one with raisins. This is not to be confused with rice puddings of other cultures (i.e. the rest of Europe i.e. the Germans i.e. the commie bastards who seduced Mussolini into disgracing the entire proud race of Italians). This is a rice pie and we just happen to be fond of putting raisins in it because raisins are great in everything!

So there you have it. My favorite Italian culinary tradition of all time and the reason I managed to gain about ten pounds in one weekend.