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