07 January 2013

Pissaladière/Pichade


A slice of pichade and a chat amongst friends.

Pichade is a dish from Menton and is a kind of pizza: a tomato sauce made ​​with cooked onions placed on a dough and decorated with cloves of garlic, black olives and anchovies.

If it's made without tomato, then it's a pissaladière.

So for anyone interested, here's a few words about it ...

Pissaladière is a pizza-like dish made in southern France, around the Nice, Marseilles, Toulon and the Var District, and in the Italian region of Liguria, especially in the Province of Imperia. Believed to have been introduced to the area by Roman cooks during the time of the Avignon Papacy, it can be considered a type of white pizza, as no tomatoes are used. The dough is usually a bread dough thicker than that of the classic Italian pizza (although a pâte brisée is sometimes used instead), and the traditional topping consists of caramelised (almost pureed) onions, olives, garlic and anchovies (either whole or in the form of pissalat, a type of anchovy paste). No cheese is used in France;[1] however in the nearby Italian town of San Remo, mozzarella is sometimes added. Now served as an appetizer, it was traditionally cooked and sold early each morning.

The etymology of the word seems to be from occitan peis, from the Latin piscis, which in turn became pissalat, (via peis salat, "salted fish" in Niçard).

6 comments:

  1. I will have to try that one day.

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  2. Odd that the French would not use cheese.

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  3. Note that this delicacy is commonly consumed with the American drink, derived from the latin "aqua sucris", i.e. "sugar water". :>!

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  4. Dave, it's not a dish that uses cheese. The French use cheese in many dishes tho. It wouldn't work with the flavours - one would drown the other and the texture would be wrong

    As for aqua sucris. Too funny! Love it!

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  5. I will want to try that in 2 months time! ;-)

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  6. Keropok Man, are you coming to Menton/Monaco?

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