Necci

Necci belong to the chestnut economy of the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines, the mountains of Garfagnana, the upper Versilia, the Pistoia highlands and the Lunigiana, where wheat would not grow and the sweet chestnut, long called the bread tree, fed whole communities. Its flour, dried and milled in autumn, was worked into polenta, bread and these thin crepes, which the rural poor ate in place of bread alongside salt pork and cheese. Traditionally they are cooked in the fire between the testi, discs of sandstone or terracotta, the batter laid between rehydrated chestnut leaves that keep it from sticking and lend their scent; a version with iron pans on the wood stove came later. The chestnut leaf and the leaf-marked crepe cross the border into Corsica, where the same food goes by another name. Necci are now listed among the traditional food products of Tuscany.

Warm and soft, the crepe folds like thin cloth around the filling. The chestnut flour gives an earthy, gently sweet, faintly smoky taste, edged with a bitter note from the browned batter, and the ricotta inside is cool and milky-sweet against it. Thin and a little fragile, each roll is soft rather than crisp, eaten hot straight from the iron.

Chestnut flour has no gluten, so the crepe is bound by starch. On the fierce heat of the testi or iron the batter's starch granules swell and gelatinise while the water flashes to steam, setting a thin sheet in a minute or two. The flour's own high sugars, unusual in a flour, caramelise and brown with its amino acids through the Maillard reaction, giving the earthy-sweet, faintly bitter, toasted flavour and the freckled colour. Having no gluten to make it elastic, the crepe stays tender and a little fragile, and it is rolled while warm, before the starch cools and firms. The chestnut leaves, or a film of oil, keep the sticky batter from welding to the metal.