Torta di Ceci (Cecina)

Torta di ceci is a thin round of chickpea-flour batter baked in a wide tinned copper pan at very high heat. The surface comes out blistered and blotched dark; the inside stays soft, almost custardy. The ingredients are chickpea flour, water, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper, which makes it naturally gluten free and vegan.

The naming is the part that confuses everyone, including Italians. Along a stretch of Tyrrhenian coast running from Nice to Livorno, the same batter answers to at least six names. In Genoa and Liguria it is farinata. In Livorno it is torta, or torta di ceci. In Pisa and Versilia it is cecina. In Massa and Carrara it is calda calda, the hot-hot. In Nice it is socca. In Sassari, where Genoese traders took it, it is fainè.

Thickness changes too, and by a lot. Genoese farinata is three or four millimetres and aims at crispness. Livornese torta is close to a centimetre and stays creamy inside. Pisan cecina sits between the two. These are not different recipes: it is the same batter poured in different quantities into the same pan.

Sweet and earthy, the way chickpeas are, with a faint bitterness underneath and a lot of olive oil carrying both. There is no dairy and no egg, so nothing rounds it off; what you get instead is a clean, savoury, slightly nutty flavour that tastes distinctly of the pulse it is made from.

Texture is where the versions separate. The thick Livornese torta gives you a crisp bottom and blistered top around a soft, spoonable middle, closer to a savoury custard than to bread. The thin Pisan and Genoese versions are crisper throughout and give more of the charred edge, which is the best part in every version.

Fresh from the oven it is hot enough to be a hazard, and that is the correct way to eat it. The black pepper ground over the top at the last second is not a garnish: it is the third flavour, and locals grind on far more than a visitor expects.

Cold or reheated it flattens out considerably. The window is minutes, not hours.

The Livornese way is the cinque e cinque: a slice of torta pushed into a bread roll, a francesino or a piece of focaccia, with ground black pepper and, for most people, oil-cured aubergine. The name comes from the historic price, five centesimi of bread and five of torta. It is carbohydrate inside carbohydrate, nutritionally indefensible, and one of the best sandwiches in Italy.

In Pisa and along the Versilia coast the cecina is eaten on its own, by the slice, standing up, with pepper. In Carrara it is sold by weight and carried away in paper.

At home it works as a starter or a light main with vegetables alongside. Do not load it with toppings: Liguria has traditional versions with onion or whitebait, but the Tuscan one is served bare and is better for it.

Reheat only in a dry non-stick pan or a hot oven, never a microwave, which turns it rubbery in ten seconds.

The single rule that matters is pepper. Torta di ceci without freshly ground black pepper is unfinished, and in every town along this coast the grinder sits on the counter for customers to use themselves. Use more than feels reasonable.

The whole thing is a set custard of chickpea flour and water with a crisp skin on top, and it starts giving that water back the moment it leaves the oven. On a rack in a single layer the surface stays crisp for half an hour or so, a little longer than the thinner Ligurian version because the extra depth holds more moisture in the middle, then steam reaches the skin and softens it. Wrapped or stacked while hot it steams itself and the crust is gone in minutes. Inside a bread roll the same thing happens faster, since the bread pulls moisture out of the wedge and gives it back as softness.

In the fridge, covered once completely cold, it holds two days and firms into something dense and sliceable as the chickpea starch sets. A dry pan or a hot oven at 200 to 230°C for a few minutes drives the moisture back off and returns the edges; a microwave only steams it further. Frozen it keeps about a month and comes back grainier, the set interior broken up by ice crystals.

It is cut in wedges straight from a wide round tinned copper pan and handed over warm, five to ten millimetres thick, deep gold with dark blistered patches and a soft, almost creamy middle. The batter is chickpea flour, water, olive oil and salt, rested for hours, with black pepper cracked over at the counter. No wheat flour, no eggs, no raising agent. On the Tuscan coast the tell is what it is served in: the Livornese cinque e cinque is a wedge stuffed into a francesino roll, sold nowhere else.

The naming is the main source of confusion. Cecina, torta di ceci and simply torta are the Pisan and Livornese words for it; Ligurian farinata is the same family under another name; socca in Nice is the thinner French cousin. Panelle in Palermo use the same flour but are set firm and fried. Chickpea pancakes on health food menus usually have eggs or baking powder in them, and anything sold as cecina with wheat flour is a different recipe. A wedge costs 2 to 3.50 euro in Livorno or Pisa and is rarely sold outside Tuscany at all.

In Tuscany, from a torteria: a slice costs 1.50 to 3 euros, or 10 to 16 euros per kilo, and a complete cinque e cinque runs 3.50 to 5 euros. In Liguria, the sciamadde of central Genoa sell farinata at 2 to 3.50 euros a wedge. Outside those regions, Ligurian and Tuscan restaurants in the big Italian cities charge 4 to 6 euros a portion.

Abroad the picture is thin. In the US and the UK you will find it occasionally on the menu of a Ligurian restaurant, at roughly 8 to 14 dollars or 6 to 10 pounds a plate, and almost never in a shop. In and around Nice it is everywhere as socca, at 4 to 6 euros.

The practical route abroad is to buy the flour and make it. Chickpea flour is sold as gram flour or besan in every South Asian grocer, usually at 2 to 4 dollars or 1.50 to 3 pounds a kilo, which is a fraction of what health-food shops charge for the identical product. Check it smells clean and nutty: chickpea flour goes rancid faster than wheat flour and stale flour bakes bitter.

The only equipment that matters is a wide, shallow metal pan, preferably steel or copper rather than glass, and an oven that reaches at least 250C.

Livorno first. The torterie of the centre and the stalls around the Mercato delle Vettovaglie, a vast covered market from 1894 and one of the finest in Italy, are where the cinque e cinque belongs. The Venezia Nuova quarter, built on canals in the eighteenth century, is the atmospheric place to eat one, especially in late July during Effetto Venezia, when the whole district fills with stalls and music.

Pisa is twenty minutes away by train and serves cecina in the fried-food shops of the old centre, around piazza delle Vettovaglie and the streets between the Arno and the cathedral. It is the standard student lunch, which keeps portions large and prices low.

Massa and Carrara sell calda calda from kiosks and small shops; it was the quarry workers' food, and eating it after a visit to the marble quarries above Colonnata, where the famous lardo is cured, makes an efficient half day.

For the comparison, Genoa is three hours up the coast, and the sciamadde in the old town serve the thin farinata alongside vegetable tarts. Doing both cities in one trip is the clearest way to understand that these are the same dish and not the same food.