cecina
cecina
Italian
“A Roman orator's family name lives on in a Tuscan street snack.”
Cecina is a thin chickpea flatbread baked in a wide copper or iron pan at very high heat, eaten in Pisa, Livorno, and across Tuscany. The word comes from the Italian 'cece,' the chickpea, plus the feminine adjectival suffix '-ina': something made from or relating to chickpeas. The cece in turn descends from the Latin 'cicer,' the chickpea, a word whose most famous trace in history is the family name of Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman orator born in 106 BCE. Ancient Romans believed Cicero's ancestors had a chickpea-shaped wart, and the family took the legume as their name.
The preparation is nearly identical to Ligurian farinata: chickpea flour, water, olive oil, and salt spread thin and baked at high temperature. In Pisa, cecina comes from wood-fired ovens in bakeries that have operated the same way since the eighteenth century, eaten folded inside a length of crusty bread called torta. The Pisans resist calling it farinata, a name they associate with Genoa, the city that defeated their fleet at the Battle of Meloria in 1284. The same battle, by some accounts, gave rise to farinata.
The Latin 'cicer' is one of the older legume words in the Indo-European family. Linguists have traced it to a pre-Latin substrate, possibly related to the Greek 'erebinthos' (chickpea) through Etruscan intermediaries, though the etymology is not settled. What is certain is that chickpeas were a staple crop across the ancient Mediterranean before wheat and barley fully dominated, and 'cicer' appears in Latin agricultural writing from at least the first century BCE. The Roman cookbook attributed to Apicius contains recipes for chickpeas with spelt and cumin.
In the twentieth century, cecina became a protected preparation. The city of Livorno registers specific temperature and pan requirements: 300 degrees Celsius minimum, a copper pan no deeper than two centimeters, olive oil from the Tuscan coast. The preparation is listed in Italy's national registry of Traditional Agri-food Products. Pisa and Livorno dispute which city does it best, a rivalry that parallels their centuries of naval and commercial competition. The chickpea, at the center of all this, does not take sides.
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Today
Cecina survives in Pisa and Livorno not because anyone protected it but because people kept eating it. It is sold by weight, still warm, from bakeries that open early and close when the pan is empty. The Pisans who eat it standing at the counter with a glass of red wine are not performing tradition: they are having lunch.
To eat cecina is to eat the Latin word for chickpea, two thousand years later, still warm.
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