The torte di Pasqua, sweet and savoury, the latter with the inevitable presence of grated or diced cheese in the dough, both prepared with many eggs, are one of the fixed points of Umbrian cooking. "Torte di Pasqua" they are called in the everyday speech of most Umbrians, regardless of whether or not one observes Easter. "Torte di Pasqua" they are called even though the link with the festival that celebrates the rebirth of nature and, for the Catholic Church, the Resurrection of Christ, is only one long chapter in the history of this festive seasoned bread. The subject is in fact a very broad one, in time and in space. As regards the cheese torta, its origin is certainly very ancient. The "mefa spefa" of the ancient Umbrians, who already knew the art of leavening, is surprisingly close to our torta di Pasqua: flour, eggs, milk, cheese. Cato reports, in the De Agricoltura, a recipe that is the undoubted ancestor of our cheese torte, similar to the variant in common use until the 1960s at Tuoro sul Trasimeno. Sweet or savoury, these torte are found, in one version or another, in one variant or another, across much of central Italy: the Marche, Abruzzo, Lazio, Tuscany, though not uniformly. The Easter cheese torta covers almost all of the Marche; in the other regions its spread is limited to more circumscribed areas, alternating or overlapping with the sweet torta. Central Italy has a shared culture, gastronomic too: local cooking is the expression, tied to the territory and sometimes to the micro-territory, of this larger area. In Umbria itself the geography of the Easter torte, until the middle of the last century, was highly varied, with the savoury one prevailing in some places and the sweet one in others, and within the two types many variants, although for centuries both have been tied to the Easter season. On Easter morning the torte were placed on the table, neatly arranged or in cheerful confusion, but in any case together with the other foods that made up the rich Easter breakfast, a long meal that took place between eleven and one, strictly after the religious rites had been fulfilled. Everything was eaten in an unspecified, uncodified sequence. With the torta went capocollo, salami, ciauscolo (the last in the Valnerina), but also hard-boiled eggs (eggs appeared, understandably, in Easter meals in many forms), omelettes, lamb offal, wine and vinsanto. Cured meats, hard-boiled eggs and omelettes were generally eaten with the cheese torta. But in the Valnerina, a territory where as late as the 1950s the ancient pastoral civilization was still alive and cheese was an everyday ingredient and therefore could not be festive food, it was the sweet torta that accompanied ciauscolo and sometimes salami. Often the soup or broth that was never missing from the Easter meal consisted of slices of cheese torta over which mutton broth was poured. An exception to the torta eaten on Easter morning together with other traditional foods is the torta that, above all in the countryside, was prepared on 6 January, the day of the Epiphany in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church, the first Easter of the year. On this occasion there was no display of torte such as at the later festivity, but in every family a single torta was made, sweet or savoury. Whatever the variants, the eggs are always many and the unit of measure is always the egg. To one egg corresponds the quantity of salt or of other things; the flour is almost never given by weight, but it is explained that it must be in a quantity sufficient to give the dough the right consistency; for each egg roughly one hundred grams of flour is used. It should also be stressed that in the cities (Perugia, Terni) the torte have for at least a century been prepared according to more generic recipes, less marked by spices or particular ingredients, and that for some time labour-saving solutions have been adopted in their making. In Terni, an industrial city, though closely tied to the peasant world, the use of the electric mixer entered the domestic sphere at least from the 1960s. The torte served for family use, to be given as gifts to relatives and friends, a tribute in practice obligatory (for the peasants) to the "master", but also to the priest, the doctor, the "authorities". They were prepared in great quantities; the gathering of the eggs began many days before the making, and they were placed in baskets and kept cool in the cellar. The making of the torte involved the whole family, the men too; an enormous quantity of ingredients was kneaded and great physical strength was required. One of the problems of the making was the leavening, also because of the cold houses.

To obtain the leavening of the torte in the shortest possible time (it was a feat in the old houses full of draughts) a series of expedients was resorted to. The leavening began in the dead of night, and a member of the family, generally a young boy or girl, watched over its progress. The stages of preparation involved the kneading of flour, salt, eggs, seasoning and leaven, the addition of grated and diced cheese, and various spices. The pans were filled halfway, and when the dough reached the rim the moment to put it in the oven arrived. A predictable moment, but only in part, because of the difficult conditions for the leaven, once always "pasta madre", far more unruly than brewer's yeast and chemical leavening. The baking in the oven too was a rite, often collective, both in the ovens of the peasant houses, where several families sometimes gathered for the baking, and in the communal or municipal ones, which until the 1950s and 1960s were active in almost every village. Often several families agreed to bake their torte together in the great community oven; in the hamlet there was a calling from one house to another: the torte of two or three households had to reach the right leavening at the same time, and so the women set to work to delay or hasten it, playing with braziers and steam. The baking, as with bread, was accompanied by magico-religious rituals. It was common practice, once the oven was closed, to trace the sign of the cross on it and to say: "God make it grow". But there were many practices, sometimes carried out and recited hurriedly and in secret to ensure the good baking of the torte. Here it was the women who took the field in a veritable contest for the best, the finest, the biggest torta. A failed batch was a real misfortune, the blame for which was often laid on envy and therefore on the "evil eye" cast by some neighbour. The city bakers too would host, for a small fee, the housewives' tins, which they marked, stamping them with a metal tool or by simpler means so as to recognize them once baked. In the days immediately before Easter there was a coming and going of people with containers, and sometimes the streets were steeped in the scent of the torte. 'Torta' in the wide Perugia area, 'pizza' throughout central and southern Umbria, 'crescia' in the Gubbio area, 'ciaccia' in the Città di Castello area: these are the names for a bread whose deep meaning was and is shared, one may well say, by an entire region. The sweet torte di Pasqua, once in the Valnerina the only kind of torta tied to this feast, were very rich in ingredients: to the basic dough were added raisins, sometimes candied fruit, rosolio; egg white and little sugar sprinkles on top decorated the outside. In the Orvieto area it was and is very simple: flour, eggs, seasoning, sugar, leaven, but also many spices, cinnamon in particular, especially powdered and in the form of rosolio, so much so as to make the inside almost brownish. Here the sweet torta is still more important (even if, always in parallel, the cheese one is also made and used); it is enjoyed together with pieces of chocolate, while on the day of the Epiphany the only torta that appears is the sweet one. In general, today it is the savoury torta that predominates. The cheese torta has undergone, in the last fifty to sixty years, some changes in ingredients and a process of standardization, but also, if one may say so, of expansion. The characterizing ingredient is the cheese: once only local pecorino (every peasant family made a few "wheels" at home for their own use) mixed with Pecorino Romano if the family could afford to buy it, whereas now it is pecorino mixed with Parmigiano or Grana Padano, often pecorino, Parmigiano and gruyère. It should be considered that the sharp taste is less liked and the torta adapts. As for the seasoning, once almost always lard (but also oil in places given over to olive growing), oil now prevails. Brewer's yeast has almost entirely taken the place of the pasta madre, even if in the last two or three years an opposite process has begun and the old leaven is starting to have its supporters again. But the substantial change is that the standard recipe (flour, eggs, salt, leaven, cheese, seasoning) prevails over the many variants tied to the territories. Spiced and linked to medieval recipes are those of the Orvieto area, where the routes of the spice merchants once passed; here the families tenaciously bound to tradition go on boiling cloves, cinnamon sticks and pepper in white wine, to be added, filtered, to the dough; they put in nutmeg and anise and whatever else, according to the family or local recipe. In the woods of Burano, above Gubbio, one can still find torte with anise and pancetta. At Tuoro sul Trasimeno some elderly lady still makes a torta that is the direct descendant of Cato's: bread dough, pecorino, eggs and the elongated shape of a loaf of bread, even if it is no longer baked on cabbage leaves.
As we were saying, in general the standard torta prevails in shops, bakeries and also in families, who often recognize themselves in it more than in that of their grandparents and great-grandparents. In any case the cheese torta di Pasqua, even if made with gruyère and without too many local variants, is in excellent health. In the Valnerina, where it was almost unknown, it is overtaking the sweet torta. In Città di Castello, where the Easter bread was once the crostello, a simple loaf with saffron in its dough, rubbed with a pork rind while still warm from the oven (on Easter morning the pater familias broke it with his hands, following the lines marked before baking, and distributed the pieces to the family). Now everyone recognizes their bread in the cheese torta. The cheese torta invaded the city neighbourhoods at the hands of the country dwellers of the Umbertide area who moved to town between the 1950s and the 1960s. At present only one old bake-to-order oven and a few families still make the ancient crostello. The torta di Pasqua has long been the object of contests to decide the best (the most famous is organized by the Palazzo del Gusto in Orvieto) and also of events (one above all, that held at Mantignana, with the participation of bakers not only local, and "torta" courses during Holy Week). As for being festive bread, for the most part it has remained so. For if it is true that it is now found all year round at bakeries and even in some renowned pastry shop – in this case mainly for the use of tourists – it is not everyday food. One need only think of the torte cut horizontally and filled with various layers of salami, tuna, pickles, mayonnaise and whatever else, which are often offered at buffets of various kinds (christening parties, birthdays) from the 1980s and 1990s onward. We also find it in rectangular torte, in the shape of a sandwich loaf or even of small cylinders, meant to be the base for sandwiches and canapés at family parties, receptions and lavish antipasti. Only to take up the ancient shape again, in almost all of upper Umbria, with the smaller base that widens towards the upper part, at Easter time. The purists of the history of gastronomy and taste perhaps recoil in horror, but the ancient torta, by changing, has remained, faithful to itself, one of the preparations of Umbrian cooking. Having lost its sacred meaning, in parallel with the dissolution of peasant civilization, it has become the food of identity of a great community: Umbria.

Works consulted

Augusto Ancillotti, Giancarlo Gaggiotti, Dalle Tavole Eugubine… in Tavola, Gubbio, 2001.

Rita Boini, La cucina umbra, i sapori di un tempo, Perugia, 1995.

Luigi Catanelli, Usi e costumi del territorio perugino agli inizi del '900, Edizioni dell'Arquata, 1987.

Rita Boini is the author of books on regional and traditional Italian cooking and on creative cooking, and of stories for children, with an attentive eye to the territory and its traditions, but also to the bond with the land and nature. She has published with Italian and foreign publishers such as Droemer und Knaur, De Agostini, Todaro. In 2001 she won the Pennagolosa prize and in 2002 she was a finalist for the Gourmand World Cookbook Award. She works at the "Corriere dell'Umbria".