Rice pie, or grain pie, is something that, like with many Italian families, was served primarily in our house at Easter. We never saw hide nor hair (nor cotton-tail) of it any other time of year. Like pumpkin pie, I suppose, which most people also normally associate with a single holiday season, rice pie sadly comes to mind only in spring, but can be good virtually all year round.
Italian rice pie can be made with any kind of rice, depending on the texture you want, or with barley, or a mixture of the two. For those who've never had it, the best way to describe it is as a kind of cross between Italian ricotta cheese cake and coconut custard pie, but with rice, of course, instead of coconut. I suppose it must sound pretty weird and un-desertlike to someone who's never tried it (the way sweet potato pie can sound downright weird when you're a kid), or to someone who thinks of rice as primarily something to eat with chinese food or as a side dish from Uncle Ben. Think of it instead as rice pudding poured into a pie-crust and you're on the right track.
Like most custard pies, I used to think it must be really difficult to make, subject to some kind of arcane only-mother-knows magic, but actually just the opposite is true. It's pretty easy to put together and one of those wonderful things whose ingredients are so inherently yummy that even if you somehow, inexplicably, screw it up, the result still tastes pretty good.
First thing you need is a pie crust. You can always buy a frozen one and defrost it but it's better if you make your own. Making a pie crust from scratch is another one of those things that people think is the product of some sort of alchemical hocus-pocus but it, too, is quite simple. Here's how you make a very simple, basic pie crust:
Take a bowl and put 2 cups of flour in it, a tablespoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt. Next add two-thirds to three-fourths of a cup of cold butter (or margarine or other shortening; I like to use Earth Balance). Use your fingers to bring it together, adding cold water sparingly until you make a ball of dough, being careful not to overwork it. Wrap the ball in saran wrap and put it in the fridge for at least twenty minutes, during which time you can start on your pie filling, or, if you have plenty of time, go back to reading John Banville's The Sea. Simple right?
When you and/or the dough is ready, you take it from the fridge and place it on a floured surface. There you flatten and roll it out and then lay it in your preferred pie tin ready for the filling. Now it sounds complicated when all the steps are broken down like this in such excruciatingly minute fashion, but so would a description of breathing or walking to the front door to fetch the mail or bending over to scratch the bottom of your foot. And, yes, I suppose it would be easier to just buy a frozen pie crust and let it sit on the kitchen counter to defrost and leave it at that, but then, it would be easier to just buy the damn pie itself at the bakery. Or to pay someone to live your heartbreaks, but wouldn't that be missing half the point? Trust me, life is hard, but it's not hard to make a pie crust.
Now it's time to make for the filling. Many recipes that you see are misleading. For some reason, they typically give you the fixings for two pies or more, often, inexplicably, without pointing out the fact. Not that making two pies is necessarily a bad idea. They're that good and likely to go fast. But here's how you make one pie.
First you boil up some rice. As I mentioned, any rice or grain will do, depending on the texture you desire. I used Arborio rice for the pie pictured above, which gives you a super-creamy, smooth-textured pie, much more custardy than if you were to use wild rice, for instance. I use plenty of rice—a good cup and a half to two cups (cooked) for a single pie. I used a rice cooker to do this, which is the easiest way to make rice. I went upstairs and got dressed while this was happening. When I came down, the rice was cooked and I set it aside for the time being, letting it cool.
Now I get to work in earnest on the filling. I put 15 ounces of ricotta cheese in a bowl and with an electric hand blender, mix in a cup and a half of sugar. I beat together three eggs and mix that in, too. Next I add a teaspoon of vanilla extract. Oh, put in another teaspoon, why not, vanilla is good. Then slowly add the rice, continuing to mix it together with the electric hand blender until its smooth and creamy.
Next you want to squeeze out the juice and zest the rind of one lemon. Now what you don't want to do is do what I did next. Which is to leave the electric hand blender in the lightweight plastic bowl and turn away, thinking to yourself, "that probably wasn't a such good idea" and in that very instant hear a loud thwack and turn round to see the bowl tipped over on the table and half the contents of your cake filling spilling over onto the floor.
"Fuck it, fuck me, fuck this stupid pie," you shout, almost in tears, because your husband has gone out to a lunch to which you haven't been invited and aren't welcome, and instead your home alone making a goddamn pie! You're kneeling there on the floor with a roll of paper towels cleaning up the slop and shouting to the empty house "why is this fucking floor so filthy anyway?" when the paper towel comes black under the pie filling. Who's dirt is this? Not mine! It's thirty years of filth, left here by the soles of shoes that walked these floors long before I ever got here, and here I am cleaning it up, baking pies. Why? What a fucking loser I am! What a pitiful doormat! Aren't I tired of it yet? Fuck this! I'm not making any pie! Let them make their own goddamn pies if they want to eat pie!
And then you picture your husband coming home in the midst of this invisible emotional hurricane, this interior dark storm in a recurrent dark midnight of the soul, blameless, really, unaware for the most part of your hazardous feelings, and you realize that, in blaming him, you will be putting him in a more or less impossible situation and you will become like one of those impossible women that on normal days you disdain of ever becoming, that you swore you'd never be. So you finish cleaning up the mess you made through your own distracted carelessness, that you more or less caused to punish yourself for you sense of inadequacy and failure, deep down having known better than to do what you did, but doing it anyway, blinded by an impulse toward self-destruction, as willful as it is beyond your conscious will, another you, an anti-you who seeks to punish you for god knows what sins you are or are not guilty of committing, a milder form of self-abnegation, thank god, than what you've been subjected to in the past.
You use up the entire roll of paper towels to clean the mess, working mechanically, hardly aware of what you're doing, lost in a private replay of all the humiliations of your past. By then the tears have left your eyes and you can see that there is still enough filling in the bowl to salvage your pie. You have enough extra ricotta and rice to replace what you've lost. You work by instinct now, estimating what you'll need to do the job. There are no recipes written to cope with these kinds of situations.
You break another egg and mix it in, add another half cup of sugar, squeeze the lemon, chop to smithereens the rind, adding more lemon, maybe 3 teaspoons of lemon juice and two of rind instead of the one teaspoon of each that the official recipe calls for because life seems more tart and more bitter than sweet to you at this moment, at all moments really, only in this moment and those like them is it more obvious.
At last you take up the hand blender again.
When you go to fetch your pie crust from the fridge you leave the hand blender propped in the bowl just like before—out of defiance...of what, of who, of life, of other people, of cosmic indifference, of fate itself perhaps?—yes and no and not exactly. This time you take precautions. You've learned your lesson but you won't surrender, not totally, not yet, not in the middle of this recipe, anyway. This time you turn the bowl in such a way that the gravity of the precarious situation won't be working entirely against you.
You dip a finger into your improvised, doctored, and patched together filling. You put your finger in your mouth. Surprise—it tastes pretty damn good! You'd never know what happened.
You pour the filling into the pie crust and into an oven preheated to 375 you slide the pie and let it bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until the crust is brown and the filling is golden and firm. Then you remove the pie and let it cool on the counter so that it sets.
When it's cooled, you can cut it and serve it at room temperature, but it's customary to put it in the fridge to further set for another couple of hours. The longer it sits the firmer it sets. It can then be served re-warmed later (less common), chilled, or at room temperature (most common. Each way of partaking of this pie has it's unique and sweet, though not too-sweet, charm.
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