52 | MARCH 30 • 2023
PASSOVER
A
great cookbook does not just
give the reader narrow-focus,
step-by-step instructions
for how to prepare a food. A great
cookbook expands its focus to show
what that food means in a whole meal
and then expands into a wide-angle
view of what that meal means to the
people who served and ate the meal.
By the time it is done, a great
cookbook portrays an entire culture
arranged around each illuminated dish.
In The Classic Cuisine of the Italian
Jews, Edda Servi Machlin sets each
recipe into her loving portrait of
her native society, the venerable and
now vanished Jewish community of
Pitigliano in Tuscany. As she recounts
her idyllic youth, the tight-knit Jewish
community appreciated its ancient
customs, slightly different from the
customs of other Jews. Christians and
Jews lived side-by-side as friends,
appreciative spectators at one another’s
celebrations.
That all changed in 1938, when the
author was in her mid-teens. Under
the fascist leader Benito Mussolini,
Italy passed antisemitic laws and most
of her neighbors went along with the
new order. “All who had remained good
friends up to that moment began to
avoid us as if we were suddenly infected
with a repulsive disease,” she writes.
During the war years, Edda Servi
survived with three siblings among the
anti-fascist partisans. Her parents and
youngest brother somehow survived
in an Italian concentration camp. The
Jewish community of Pitigliano, after
thriving for at least 600 years, never
recovered. It continued to exist only in
Servi’s memory and in the memories of
other survivors.
When she moved to the United
States in 1958, Servi found the Italian
food here disappointing, never nearly
as good as her mother’s cooking. She
married Eugene Machlin in 1960; guests
at their table appreciated her cooking
and asked for recipes. She collected
these recipes, and reconstructed the
Jewish community of her youth in her
first book, The Classic Cuisine of the
Italian Jews: Traditional Recipes and
Menus and a Memoire of a Vanished
Way of Life.
Edda Servi Machlin died in 2019 at
age 93.
MATZAH BAKING IN PITIGLIANO
The town of Pitigliano sits on the side
of a hill. Deep under the town, literally
hewn into the volcanic bedrock, a
winding stone staircase leads down to
the communal kosher bakery. Previous
generations had constructed a primitive
oven and ancient baking equipment in
that underground chamber, illuminated
by a window cut into the side of the
hill.
A few weeks before Passover, teams
of residents cleaned the chamber and
prepared it for use. Then, taking turns,
one family after another carefully
carried the ingredients down to the
chamber, where they baked their
matzah and other kosher-for-Passover
baked goods, and brought the finished
products back up to the surface.
Around the world, most Jewish
communities insist on simple-looking
matzah, roughly round handmade
matzah or square machine-made
LOUIS FINKELMAN
A classic Italian Jewish recipe for Passover.
Buon Appetito!
LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Torta
del Re