farinata

Farinata is a thin, unleavened chickpea-flour pancake baked in a copper or iron pan, and Genoa has claimed it as its own since at least the thirteenth century. The word is Italian for 'made of flour,' built from 'farina' (flour) with the suffix '-ata,' which signals a preparation defined by its main ingredient. The farina itself comes from the Latin 'far,' a word for emmer wheat or spelt that Romans ground and boiled long before wheat flour dominated Mediterranean kitchens. When chickpea flour replaced grain flour in the Ligurian version, the name stayed the same.

The founding story, told in Genoese cookbooks since the nineteenth century, places farinata's origin on a galley returning from the Battle of Meloria in 1284. A storm swamped the ship's provisions, soaking sacks of chickpea flour and jugs of olive oil in seawater. The sailors spread the wet paste on shields to dry in the sun, and the hardened result was edible enough to repeat intentionally. Back in Genoa, bakers refined the accident in wood-fired ovens, and by the fourteenth century the city had established sciamadde, specialist shops selling nothing but hot farinata.

The same preparation traveled the Ligurian coast under different names. Nice called it socca, Toulon called it cade, Sardinia called it fainè, and the Argentine port city of Buenos Aires, swollen with Genoese immigrants after 1880, called it fainá and ate it on top of pizza. Each name is a variant of 'farina' filtered through a different dialect or language, but the recipe is almost identical: one part chickpea flour, two parts water, a generous pour of olive oil, a hot oven, a thin pan.

Genoa fought to protect the name in the twenty-first century. In 2015 the Italian government registered Farinata di ceci as a Traditional Agri-food Product, and Liguria pushed for Protected Geographical Indication status against competition from Tuscan cecina and Sardinian fainè. The legal boundary between these preparations is thin, barely a regional accent. What distinguishes Genoese farinata from its cousins is the specific copper pan called a testo and a wood-burning oven that reaches 300 degrees Celsius or higher.