Pizza di Scarola (Neapolitan Escarole Pie)

Pizza di scarola is a covered savoury pie, twenty-five to thirty centimetres across, made from two rounds of bread dough enclosing a filling of stewed escarole. It is not a pizza in the sense the word usually carries abroad: in Naples pizza describes any flattened, oven-baked thing, and this is one of the older uses of the term.

The filling is the dish. Escarole wilted in olive oil with garlic, black Gaeta olives, capers rinsed of their salt, pine nuts, raisins, and salted anchovies melted into the oil. The sweet-and-savoury combination is an old Mediterranean signature, and the raisins and pine nuts trace back to the same medieval Arab influence that shows up across southern Italian cooking.

It belongs to 24 December. The Neapolitan Christmas Eve table is meatless by religious custom, and the pie sits alongside fried eel, salt cod and the pickled cauliflower salad called insalata di rinforzo. Bakeries and rotisseries across the city sell it all winter regardless.

Salty first, sweet a beat later. The anchovies, capers and olives hit immediately and make it read as an intensely savoury pie; then the raisins arrive and pull the whole thing sideways. It is a genuinely unusual balance for anyone raised on Northern European savoury pastry, and it is the reason the dish is memorable rather than merely nice.

Underneath both is the escarole itself, which loses most of its bitterness in the pan and turns soft, silky and faintly green-tasting. The pine nuts add a resinous crunch that stops the filling being uniformly soft.

The crust is bread, not pastry: thin, chewy, slightly oily on the base where it has fried against the tin. It contributes texture and a little salt and stays out of the way.

Served warm rather than hot, which is how Neapolitans eat it, the flavours separate properly. Straight from the oven the salt dominates everything.

Serve it warm or at room temperature, never straight from the oven. Half an hour of resting lets the salt settle and the sweetness of the raisins come forward; hot from the tin it tastes of anchovy and nothing else. Cut it into wedges like a tart: a 28cm tin gives eight starter portions or four main courses.

On Christmas Eve it goes on the table with fried eel, salt cod and the pickled cauliflower salad, as one savoury element among several. The rest of the year, treat it as the excellent portable lunch that it is: it survives a bag, it needs no reheating, and it is genuinely better on day two.

Two failures to avoid, both of them about water. First, wring the cooked escarole out with your hands before it goes into the dough; residual liquid steams the base from the inside and leaves it raw. Second, let the filling go completely cold, because warm filling does the same damage.

Do not remove the raisins because they seem out of place. Without the sweet counterweight the filling is relentlessly salty, and the dish stops making sense.

The same method works with other winter greens outside the Christmas context, and in Naples a summer version is made with courgettes.

This is a pie built to be made ahead. Baked, cooled uncovered and then kept under a cloth at room temperature, it holds a day, and the Neapolitan habit of making it the evening before is about letting the filling settle and the crust take up some of the oil. What changes as it sits is moisture heading outwards from the greens: the base softens first, a bread dough casing firms and stales while a pastry one goes limp. Wrapping it while still warm traps steam and soaks the underside within minutes.

In the fridge, wrapped once cold, it keeps three or four days, the crust going soft and the filling stiffening as the olive oil sets. Ten to fifteen minutes at 180°C dries the base out again and loosens the oil. Whole or in wedges it freezes one to two months well wrapped, and reheats from frozen at a gentler 160 to 170°C so the centre catches up with the crust; expect a softer base afterwards, since the greens release more water once thawed. Go by the day it was baked.

It is a closed round pie, 24 to 28 centimetres across, sealed on top and usually pricked, baked to a deep gold. The casing is either a bread dough or a short pastry made with oil or lard, and it should be thin enough that the pie is mostly filling. Cut it and the inside is dark green and densely packed: escarole stewed right down with Gaeta olives, capers, anchovies, pine nuts, raisins, garlic and chilli. That sweet and salty pull between the raisins and the anchovies is the Neapolitan signature and the quickest way to tell a real one.

What it gets confused with abroad: spanakopita, which is filo and feta; Ligurian torta pasqualina, which is chard, ricotta and whole eggs in many pastry layers; and calzone, which is folded into a half moon and usually filled with cheese and salumi. Within Naples itself, pizza rustica or pizza chiena is the Easter pie full of cheese and cured meats, a different thing on a different feast. Bakeries and rosticcerie sell it around Christmas at 8 to 14 euro a pie; outside Italy it is essentially a home kitchen dish.

In Naples, from a neighbourhood bakery or rotisserie rather than a restaurant: this is takeaway and home food. A whole 28cm pie costs 8 to 14 euros, a slice 2.50 to 4, or 10 to 14 euros per kilo. Prices rise a couple of euros in December, and city-centre bakeries close their Christmas Eve order books days in advance.

Elsewhere in Italy, Neapolitan delicatessens in the northern cities sell it at 14 to 18 euros per kilo through the winter. Outside Italy it is not a commercial product at all: it is a dish you make, not one you buy.

Making it is cheap and the shopping list is short. Escarole runs 1.50 to 3 euros a kilo in season in Italy, about 3 to 5 dollars a head in the US and 2 to 4 pounds in the UK. Raw bread dough can be bought by weight from most Italian bakeries for 2 to 3 euros a kilo, which saves the longest step; abroad, ask a local pizzeria, or use a plain bread dough recipe.

The expensive items are pine nuts, which comfortably exceed 40 euros a kilo, and salt-packed anchovies. Neither can be skipped, but both are used in small quantities: a whole pie costs 6 to 8 euros in ingredients.

Naples in December. From the start of the month the trays appear in bakery windows across the city, and the best hunting grounds are the working neighbourhoods rather than the tourist streets: the Quartieri Spagnoli, the Sanità, Forcella, and the shops around the Vomero markets, where it is sold by weight from the counter.

In Christmas week, via San Gregorio Armeno, the street of the nativity-scene craftsmen and so crowded it is barely walkable, is ringed by bakeries turning out pizza di scarola continuously. Combining the two is the best possible use of a December morning in the city.

The historic friggitorie of the old centre, the fried-food counters that also sell zeppole and fried pizza, make individual fried versions called pizzelle di scarola, eaten straight from the oil.

Beyond Naples the pie is made across Campania. In the Cilento, south of Salerno, a version with fresh anchovies instead of salted ones is worth the detour, and in southern Lazio around Gaeta and Formia they make it with the local olives that the Neapolitan recipe calls for by name.