When my Aunt Maria Ciancio passed away recently at age 92, my husband made a request: Save the family recipes. I did.

Maria – “Nini” to her sisters’ children – was not the family’s alpha cook. That role fell first to my grandmother and then to my Aunt Sophie, now 93 and the oldest of my grandmother’s three daughters.

Nini, however, did something her mother and two sisters didn’t do. She wrote down their recipes.

Nini, whose sharp memory stayed with her until her final hours, served as the de facto family historian.

It was Nini who told me that my grandmother’s father had wanted my grandmother to marry a certain man because his violin playing was impressive. My grandmother had other ideas. She had fallen for my grandfather, one of three brothers who had left their family in Italy as teenagers and who lived across the street from her on Providence’s Federal Hill. My grandmother told her father that if he forced her to marry the violinist, “When I’m up at the altar and the priest asks if I want to marry him I’m going to say no.” She won the argument.

The DiFolco women – the author’s mother, grandmother and aunts – are shown at the family home in Providence, R.I., in the 1940s. Seated is Anna, and her three daughters, from left, Anna, Sophie and Maria.

Like the recipes, many of my grandparents’ papers were saved by Nini, and finding them, I was reminded how much of my family’s story is a tale of immigration. In the same envelope as my grandfather’s certificate declaring him to be a naturalized U.S. citizen (he was 33 at the time) was a form I found curious: My grandmother signed an “Oath of Renunciation and Allegiance” to the United States in 1941, which effectively repatriated her, even though she’d been born in Providence and had never left the country in all of her then-40 years. It turns out that, prior to 1922, women lost their citizenship if they married men who were not U.S. citizens. My grandparents had married in 1921, before my grandfather’s U.S. citizenship, so my grandmother was forced to give up hers.

Another, less important immigration narrative plays out among the recipe cards. At Easter, everyone made a pie called pastiera. More accurately, everyone made two pies: One with wheat, one with rice.

Nini, the middle sister, had written down her mother’s recipe, oldest sister Sophie’s recipe and her own recipe. I already had the recipe of the youngest sister, Anna, my mother, who died in 2013.

As a child, I’d loved the wheat pie, with its chewy whole grains and bits of lemon and citron. I decided to make it, and the recipe’s evolution from my grandmother’s kitchen to mine speaks to the way Americans reshape whichever culture they hybridize, particularly in the kitchen.

The recipes first presented a mystery. My two aunts’ versions called for using the “Gloves” recipe for the crust. I found a recipe card labeled “Gloves” and it was, indeed, a crust, but why was it called “Gloves?” I could recall none of the four women using the term to refer to anything but what you’d expect. As you can imagine, googling “gloves” and “pastry” turns up a multitude of places to buy gloves to use in the kitchen. I wondered if it were an Italian word and ran it through an online translation program. Nothing. I asked a few people who like to cook. No clue. Finally, I called Aunt Sophie. She knew the answer: The crust is made from the same dough twisted into bow-like shapes and deep fried to create Wandies, a cross between a pastry and a cookie that was ubiquitous at Italian weddings I’d attended. Wandies are apparently nicknamed “gloves.”

Next came a challenge. My mother had complained to me about six years ago that she could no longer find the jarred or canned wheat that went into the pie. Food Editor Peggy Grodinsky did some research and determined that the wheat, grown in southern Italy, is called grano cotto, and my husband – He Who Wanted the Recipes – also did some research and ordered a couple of cans of it online.

However, there is a lesson in these recipe cards: Use what’s available. Adapt. Substitute. For pastiera, that turns out to be using wheat berries.

This Italian Wheat Pastiera is made from wheat berries and ricotta cheese. It’s a traditional dessert served at Easter.

Here are some of the other adaptations and differences among the recipes:

• All the recipes call for soaking “whole wheat” for 72 hours before baking. I instead cooked the wheat berries (which the package notes are pre-steamed) according to the directions on the package – 15 minutes.

• Reduce the fat by using part-skim ricotta cheese. Be sure to drain it first. For my next attempt, I plan to substitute Greek yogurt for some of the ricotta. (Sorry, Italian ancestors.)

• I went with all orange peel instead of citron/orange peel mix, just because I couldn’t find citron in the market. My mother’s recipe also adds lemon peel to the mix.

• My grandmother’s recipe calls for Spry vegetable shortening, a product that enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s. I don’t know why she needed it since her daughters all omitted it or any substitute.

• Orange flower water and orange flavoring have given way to orange juice in the three sisters’ recipes.

• Sophie’s recipe calls for 1 cup of sugar; Nini’s calls for 2 cups. My mother used 1 cup in the filling but added sugar to her crust. I used 2 cups of sugar and found the pastiera a little too sweet. Next time, I’m going to cut back the amount and try light brown sugar to add moistness.

•  All the recipes call for boiling the milk, then cooling it before adding it in. I suspect this step dates from the days when it was a food safety issue, but I did it anyway.

• The ladies seem to have serious disagreement on the number of eggs: three, six or 12. I went with three, separated, and beat the whites, hoping it might give the pie a lighter texture.

• The recipes variously call for baking two or three 9-inch pies or one monolith in a springform pan. I favor the single pie in a springform, which is how my mother made it. When I tested this recipe, however, I made one 9-inch pie and another that filled about half a springform pan. Next time, I’ll go all-in with one springform pan.

• This pie crust is chewy, as opposed to flaky. I’m guessing that any pie crust that suits your palate would work fine. When I rolled out the dough, I made it too thick so it was quite formidable to the teeth.

• The baking temperatures and times vary on the recipe cards. I used a convection oven heated to 325 degrees. Even the 9-inch pie took an hour to bake. My mother’s recipe for the large springform pie puts the cooking time at up to two hours in a conventional oven at 325 degrees.

Would the women in my family have objected to my recipe changes? I doubt it, especially since each had developed her own version. Whether a recipe originates in a small Italian village or an old Maine logging camp, we American cooks draw on our ingenuity as we adapt it for this place, this time.

One more note: Unlike today’s food scene, where competition rules, the Italian culture of my heritage considers feeding people to be an act of love. My children will tell you that my mother (their grandmother) never showed up to visit without bringing a lasagna or two because she knew that was their favorite.

That kind of love is an ingredient that Nini knew she didn’t have to write down.

Jill Brady/Staff Photographer
Carol McCormick Semple reconstructed an old family recipe for Italian Pastiera, a sweet wheat pie served at Easter.

WHEAT PASTIERA

Crust:

3 eggs

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 teaspoon sugar

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon flavoring (vanilla, orange or lemon extracts)

2 cups flour

Mix all ingredients except flour in a food processor or bowl. Add flour. Roll out the dough so it will fill two (9-inch) pie plates or 1 springform pan, with enough crust left over to form a lattice top.

Filling:

1 cup wheat berries

2 pounds part-skim ricotta, drained

2 cups sugar

3 eggs, separated

1 cup boiled milk, cooled

½ cup finely chopped orange peel

1½ tablespoons orange juice

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Cook the wheat berries according to package directions, making sure they remain chewy.

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.

Blend the ricotta, sugar and egg yolks.

Add the cooled milk, wheat berries, orange peel and juice, and cinnamon.

Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold them into the batter.

Pour the batter into the crust-lined pan, top with lattice crust and bake until the pie is set in the middle, just over an hour for the 9-inch pies and 1¾ to 2 hours for a single larger pie. Cooking times aren’t exact, so keep a close eye on it toward the end. It’s done when the center no longer jiggles and a butter knife inserted in the middle comes out with just a little moistness.

Carol McCormick Semple can be contacted at 791-6371 or at:

csemple@pressherald.com

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