Ceci | Three Ingredients and a Fire
The chickpea circle they bake twice a week next door
The first one I saw was sitting on the counter at Da Osvá, our local pizzeria, like something nobody had finished. A plain circle the color of a low winter sun, crusted and blistered across the top, no cheese, no tomato, no oil slick, no anything, parked between the pizzas where it had no business being.
Da Osvá is next to our front door, close enough that we are there more than we admit. It is not a restaurant. It is a wood oven, a counter, five tables, a few more chairs out on the street when it is warm, and a fridge of beer and soda you open yourself. Alessandro runs it with his family, and Alessandro trained in Rome, which is why the pizza is Naples-style and very good, and why the flour comes in a box so expensive-looking that for a while I assumed it was a Gucci box that had wandered into the wrong shop.
We asked what the circle was. Ceci, he said. He makes it twice a week, almost always to order, and that one already belonged to somebody. We could not have it. So we booked the next batch, which is an absurd thing to do for a food made of chickpea flour and water, and we waited two days like people waiting on a table at a place with a list.
We carried it home, wrapped in paper, and ate it on the terrace, which, in our case, is one of four, a fact I mention only because it makes the chickpea flour funnier. The whole recipe is chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt, baked hard and fast until the top burns. That is the list. There is nothing under it and nothing on it. I ate the entire circle myself, and I do not eat much.
.
The pull is hard to argue with. It is salty and oily and floury, and then the chickpea sits underneath all of that and moves the taste somewhere bread never goes, and because the oven treats it with no mercy, the crust runs all the way up, and the edges go to little black points. I am not vegan, I am not vegetarian, I wouldn’t even call myself someone who follows a healthy diet, unless we call the Mediterranean diet healthy (we do, because most of us eat so much processed food crap that eating organic veggies is considered healthy, and not normal). But this ceci, this is healthy.
It is also almost impossible to ruin well and almost impossible to do right. Too much oil and it slicks in the hand. Too little heat and it never leaves the paste stage. Too much flour and you are eating warm cardboard. Too much salt and it cracks apart before you have folded it. And you cannot make it at home, not really, because the part that matters is not in the recipe. It is the oven. A real one, brick and flame, the old kind, not a gas box doing an impression of one. The fire comes over the top and chars the rim, and the char is the entire point. So my rule is simple, and I do not break it: I do not order ceci anywhere I cannot see the oven. I have eaten it in Lucca, Pisa, Carrara, Genova, Lerici, Chiavari, and at home in Pietrasanta, and every good one was sitting by a fire when I found it.
For the price of a glass of Chianti, unlock the full Anywhere Italy experience. All of our articles, private stories, and access to our chat travel community.
Start your free 7-day trial.
After Da Osvá, I started seeing it everywhere, which is the way these things go once you have a name for them. In Tuscany it is ceci. Cross the line into Liguria and the same circle is farinata, a touch saltier. Every town keeps its own word for it and guards the word like a border. They share the dish because of a war, obviously, here in “all our history is based around thousand years old city-states” Italy. In the 13th century, Genoa broke the Pisan fleet off and sailed home with the survivors and a hold full of prisoners, and somewhere on that crossing a storm put the chickpea sacks and the oil barrels onto the floor with the seawater, and it dried into a crust the sailors ate because there was nothing else to eat. The Genoese, pleased with themselves, called it the gold of Pisa. The towns still cooking it are the towns that once fought over the water it was insulted in. The only real difference I have ever managed to taste, eight hundred years on, is more salt going north and more oil going south.
Three ingredients leave nowhere to hide. That is why so few places bother, and fewer get it right, because there is nothing to set in front of a mistake, no topping to cover for a flat crust, no sauce to carry a bad bake. The oven does it, or it does not. We ate ours off the paper on the terrace, the burned edges first, the way you take the best part before anyone thinks to ask you for a piece.
