Pizz e Foje

Pizz e foje — dialect for 'bread and leaves' (pizza e foglie) — belongs to the cucina popolare frentana of inland Chieti, an anonymous peasant dish with no dated origin, born of what the land gave for free. The cornmeal pizza was the poor household's stand-in for wheat bread, and the 'foje' were whatever wild greens could be foraged from the fields. The dish is tied to the products of Altino, whose dried sweet pepper — small, horn-shaped, sun-dried, sometimes milled to powder — is a recognised Slow Food Presidio. It is the sweet Altino pepper, not chilli, that gives the dish its identity; chilli is only an optional addition.

The cornbread chunks are dense and faintly sweet, their broken edges soaked just enough with the greens' oily juices to soften while the centres stay firm. The wild greens carry a clean field bitterness, slicked with garlic and oil. Then the dried sweet pepper hits — shatter-crisp, deep red, sweet rather than hot, almost smoky from its drying. Each forkful is the soft crumble of corn against the bitter greens against that brittle pepper shard.

Cornmeal has no gluten, so a small share of wheat flour is worked in to give the dough enough structure to hold a flat loaf together; the traditional hearth method bakes it from above and below under a coppo, the heated concave iron lid, giving an even crust the open fire cannot. The greens are parboiled first to strip their harshest bitterness and any grit, then finished in garlicky oil so they stay savoury rather than acrid. Drying concentrates the Altino pepper's sugars and, fried briefly in hot oil, it crisps and caramelises lightly without scorching, which would turn it bitter.