Parmesan Pie

Appears in
Oxford Companion to Food

By Alan Davidson

Published 2014

  • About

Parmesan pie is an Italian dish demonstrating the continuity of culinary traditions in the Mediterranean basin. The Italian scholar Anna Martellotti (1998) has shown how a descent from a grandiose Babylonian confection of around 1700 BC (see babylonian cookery) may be established using recipes drawn from medieval Egypt, southern Italy, and the Veneto and ending in an evocation by the novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa in his great novel The Leopard. The Babylonian avatar is a pie filled with birds and their entrails, together with pastry rolls, all cooked in a single sauce. The principle, therefore, is both of elaboration and dough outside and dough inside the pie: a wheaten double-whammy. Passing quickly by classical references, Martellotti produces her Egyptian evidence: a highly spiced pie of lamb, game, and birds, topped off with small pastry rolls stuffed with meat, sugar, and other sweetmeats. Again, elaboration and a dough within a dough, adding in the sweet flavours so beloved of Persian cookery, a strong influence on that of the Arabs. The culinary exchanges between East and West reflected in early Italian recipe manuscripts are endorsed by the appearance there of another amazing pie, this time under the name of torta parmesana. In six layers, each separated by a sprinkling of stuffed dates, the cooks assembled chicken, cheese ravioli, sausages of two sorts, minced pork, and sweet almond ravioli. This model can then be further pursued through the thickets of printed Italian cookbooks of the early modern era, the major change in its make-up being the substitution of macaroni (and sometimes other shapes, depending on the region) for the ravioli. The final act is Lampedusa’s description of an emblematic Sicilian dish, served to an audience expecting his Prince to offer French haute cuisine, a ‘tower-shaped macaroni timbale … The brownish-gold of the pastry covering, the fragrance of sugar and cinnamon, … the chicken livers, the small hard-boiled eggs, the tiny strips of ham, chicken and truffles all mixed up with the … macaroni.’ This pie is still today one of the festive dishes of the island of Malta (always strongly influenced by Italian culture). Maltese Timpana differs only in no longer mixing savoury and sweet. Martellotti further suggests that the Neapolitan dish Parmigiana di melanzane, where fried aubergine slices are layered with meatballs, tomato sauce, and Parmesan cheese, although eschewing pastry, takes its name from and is a relic of this tradition of rich, multi-layered pasta pies: the pasta merely having been replaced by a vegetable. Of course, that complex embraces the whole world of the Italian pasticcio (which is a word that means ‘mess’ as well as pie) and the Greek pastitsio, deriving in the long term, like the more elaborate Parmesan pie, from Arab inspiration.