Pastiera Napoletana, Baked Past Easter

Grain in a cheesecake sounds odd until you taste it. The wheat is cooked until tender but keeps a little bite, so every forkful of smooth ricotta has small, chewy grains running through it. Without them the filling would be a plain sweet cream; with them it has texture, almost like a rice pudding set firm.

The scent is the other half. Citrus and orange blossom are what a Neapolitan smells first when a pastiera is cut, and the perfume is strong enough that the whole kitchen knows when one is cooling. In Naples, families once soaked raw wheat for days before cooking it; plenty now start from jars of ready-cooked grain sold for exactly this purpose.

At home in Naples the pastiera is made during Holy Week, often on the Thursday or Friday, and left to rest before Easter Sunday. It is widely said to taste better the next day, once the orange blossom and citrus have settled into the ricotta. That is useful news for anyone ordering a whole one: buying it the day before a dinner is the traditional way, not a compromise. And it is the reason we see no harm in baking it all year.

The individual pastiera is a single portion for the counter or for later. The whole pie comes in two sizes: the small one serves four to five, and the big one is meant for a larger table. There is also a Pastiera al Pistachio in the small size, for anyone who wants the tradition and our house nut in the same slice. At home, cut it with a thin knife wiped clean between slices and the lattice stays tidy. All of our cakes to share are gathered on the whole Italian cakes page.

If ricotta and citrus already sound like home, you may know them from the filling of a sfogliatella; the pastiera takes the same flavors somewhere softer. For where it sits among the other sweets of Naples, see our pastry guide.