italian rice pie

From another thread, I was asked by boar-d-laze to post this rustic italian desert.
Use a pasta frolla - preferably the one posted on that post about pie crusts.
2 quarts milk
2 cups of rice (plain white nonconverted rice - arborio is good, but carolina is fine)
salt to taste
skin of one lemon without the white part (it can be a long peel, you take it out later - zests would make it too lemony i think)
2 cups sugar
vanilla
5 eggs
4 tbsp butter
1 lb ricotta
Now, keep in mind this is my grandmother's recipe, as my mother figured out the measures of completely eyeballed quantities, and i really don;t know how many pies it makes - i believe three. I usually halve it, but we usually make it in a large pie pan, so go figure.
Cook the rice in the milk with the lemon peel until the rice is tender and the milk is absorbed. You'll have to keep it on low, stir occasionally to be sure it doesn;t burn, and make sure the pot is big enough or it will spill out.
Take off heat
remove rind.
add butter, sugar, and cool. Stir in eggs and ricotta.
Bake in a pastella (bottom crust of a pasta frolla) (not a cooked bottom crust) and finish with a lattice top cut with a ravioli cutter (zigzagged wheel cutter). Traditionally you make "i becchi" - the beaks - you cut the dough that hangs over the edge of the pie dish diagonally, 45 degree angle, say towards the left. Then take the flap with the sharper angle and fold it inwards so you have a triangle hanging off the edge of the dish. Keep doing it all around and then lift them up and fold them all inwards, so the pie has these points facing in.
Bake at 350 till browned.

The reason it took me so long to post this is that many of my cookbooks including the notebook where i have all my handwritten recipes are all very precariously lined up on the top of the fridge, and if i took this notebook out i knew i would have to spend ten minutes fixing the others so they didn;t all fall all over the ground. sorry.

maybe you can tell me how many pies it makes! I usually end up having leftover rice or leftover dough.

I never got to see her bake because she died when i was still very young, but I imagine that my nonna used what she found in america. Nevertheless i suspect that here she used a dish much like our pie dishes. I say this because it's next to impossible to find a straight-sided cake pan here, unless it's one of the springlock variety, usually an imported brand. When she was in italy (they moved in the 1920s with my mother, still only 6) they would bake them in the town oven, where the baker would let people use the cooling oven after the bread was made - they would have to make an appointment near the holidays. People didn;t have home ovens. Lots still don;t, and most of the ones i've seen are barely able to handle lasagne - they're tiny and with a very unreliable thermostat (if they have one at all) and very uneven heat.

This is an interesting difference here, anyway, and probably why there isn;t much of a tradition of baking at all. Unlike the american situation, where most people lived far from a town, in italy everyone crowded in the town, with the walls around it, closed at night against theives and wolves. Thus there were bakeries near most people. There is some tradition of country baking, but really, what i've had is dry and really without interest. (also, consider it was a very poor country, so peasants, who might be more in a position to have to bake their own bread, could hardly afford to waste the eggs they could sell at the market on baking. Not to mention the luxury item, sugar. (there are exceptions of course, sicily, sardinia, other places have traditions based on local ingredients - like a profusion of almonds, figs, etc and there were once-a-year holiday splurges)

In my grandmother's village, they mainly ate chestnuts - the little house (yes, i saw it) had a sort of airy basement where they stored them. They were ground for flour, and they used it to made porridge (polenta), necci (flat pancake things cooked between two flat irons), castagnaccio, and various other things i always found rather unpleasant (a sort of porridge of red wine boiled with chestnut flour). Poor people couldn;t afford wheat, and survived on these. (In case you're wondering, soup was the poor people's dish all over italy, not pasta, which was for holidays or for the well off.)