Every year around Christmas and Easter, my grandmother would bake two pies, adding American touches to recipes that she had inherited from her mother, an immigrant from Bari. I learned their legitimate names after I’d studied Italian in college—pizza dolce and pizza rustica—but in our family, they were pronounced pitsadolch and pitsarusk. Native New Yorkers, my grandparents used dialect only when referring to food (pasta fagioli, a staple in southern Italy, became pasta fazul); the rest of the time, they spoke English. 

My grandmother spent days in our kitchen in Astoria, Queens, preparing the pies. Sometimes she’d let me help, but I mainly watched. My favorite task involved grating Hershey bars, sprinkling the chocolate flakes onto a bowl of ricotta and mascarpone, and smoothing the batter with an eggbeater. With its soft, grainy filling tasting faintly of rum, pitsadolch complemented pitsarusk, which I preferred. Many years later, I can still feel the hard, flaky crust crumbling in my mouth, yielding layers of hardboiled egg, prosciutto, salami, pepperoni, and provolone. 

Before I understood enough standard Italian to know better, I’d frequently ask for pitsadolch and pitsarusk in Manhattan bakeries, baffling the staff. Yet my quest for phantom pies didn’t end with my discovery of their official names. The pies I bought from Veniero’s couldn’t compete with my childhood memories: the pizza dolce wasn’t sweet enough; the pizza rustica was too salty. I am still searching for my grandmother’s recipes. 

 

 

 

– Victoria Tomasulo

Relationship:  Grandchild of im/migrant Grandchild of im/migrant