Visit the Riviera at Home: Socca/Farinata

"Socca," also called, "farinata" in Italian, is a flatbread made from chickpea flour and it is a specialty of the Liguria region in northwestern Italy and also across the Franco-Italian border into the city of Nice in France. "Nice" in French, and "Nizza" in Italian, the area was part of Italy (actually the Kingdom of Sardinia, the forerunner of the modern united Italian nation) after Napoleon's defeat until 1860, when a treaty allowed it to be annexed to France, then under Napoleon III. The modern Italian border lies a little less than 25 miles away. This flatbread has its roots in the Liguria region of Italy, the coastal area of northwestern Italy, also known as the "Italian Riviera," which has Genoa as its most prominent city, as well as its capital, but it is also a specialty of Nice. The outside is crisp, but the inside should be soft and kind of creamy. You can eat the bread with a little salt and olive oil, or you can use any number of toppings on it, even making it into a pizza, which if you use the Italian form of Nice, you could call, "a Nizza pizza," and you could say, "Give me a piece o' Nizza pizza."

Ingredients:

1 cup chickpea flour
1 cup barely lukewarm water
1/2 tablespoon olive oil (more for pan & topping)
1 teaspoon chopped fresh rosemary
1/4 teaspoon pepper
2/3 teaspoon salt

Mix together the ingredients (a whisk is good to use), slowly adding the water while whisking, taking care to eliminate any lumps. Cover the batter and let it stand for about 45 minutes. Turn on the broiler of your oven. Also turn on the large burner of your stove top to medium high. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil to a 9 inch to 10 inch cast iron skillet.* Heat the skillet on the stove top until it just begins to smoke. Swirl the hot oil around in the pan, so that it coats part way up the sides of the skillet. Add the batter into the hot skillet, swirling the batter to form an even layer over the entire bottom of the skillet. Once the batter is "set" in the skillet and the edges begin to sizzle, remove the skillet from the stove top and place it on the oven rack about 6 inches from the broiler. Broil until the top is brown and it has some dark brown to even blackened spots on it. Serving: cut into wedges, sprinkle each with a little salt and pepper, then add a few drops of extra virgin olive oil onto each wedge.   

* In the Riviera region they have special pans for making socca/farinata, which are typically cast iron pizza pans. 

WORD HISTORY:
River/Riviera-These words are distantly related to "riven" and "rift," both of North Germanic origin from the Germanic form from Indo European. "River" goes back to Indo European "reip," which had the notion, "to tear, to tear through, to tear apart, to cut into." This gave Latin "ripa," meaning, "seashore, embankment/bank of a river," both from the idea of "land forms made by water 'cutting' through or into land." This then produced the Latin adjective, "riparius," meaning, "of or from a (river)bank (and also, 'a seashore?')," which then produced the noun  "riparia," meaning, "a riverbank, a seashore," but also the idea of "riverbank" began to be applied to the "flowing water that formed the banks;" thus, the meaning, "river." This passed into Latin-based Old French as "riviere," meaning, "river, riverbank." This was taken to England by the Normans as "rivere," meaning, "river," and this was borrowed into English in the first part of the 1200s. The Old French word was taken by Italian as "riviera," with the idea of "embankment/bank," taking the meaning, "shore, coast" in Italian, "seemingly" especially applied to the coast of the Genoa area by the mid 1600s, including in English, but then expanded to mean the coastline in northwestern Italy and into southern France in the 1800s, as this overall general area was a retreat many well to do Europeans used in winter.