Recipe
Orecchiette with cime di rapa, chickpeas, and chilli breadcrumbs
Puglia spent several hundred years being accidentally vegan and had the decency not to make a personality out of it.
The reason was not ethics. It was that meat was expensive and the region was poor, and what Puglia had instead was hard wheat, olive oil, chickpeas, broad beans, wild greens growing free at the edge of every field, and a coastline. Out of that came a cuisine the rest of Europe spent the twentieth century ignoring and the twenty-first century putting on menus at eighteen euros a plate under the heading cucina povera, which translates as poor cooking and is now, reliably, the most expensive thing on the page.
Orecchiette with cime di rapa is the flagship. The traditional version carries two anchovy fillets melted into the oil, and their job is not fishiness, it is salt and a low background hum. Chickpeas do a different job equally well: they bring body, they turn the plate into a complete meal rather than a first course, and half of them fried crisp in the garlic oil give you something to bite against all that softness.
Cime di rapa, turnip tops, are bitter in a way that surprises people the first time. That bitterness is the entire point, and it is why the dish needs three things pushing back: the sweetness of a decent olive oil, the heat of a dried chilli, and enough salt. Get that balance and you understand why Apulians are so insufferable about this particular plate of food.
The breadcrumbs are not a garnish either. In a region where parmigiano was a luxury, toasted breadcrumbs did the work of cheese, and here they do it better than cheese would. They go on at the table, never into the pan, and never into the lunchbox: they travel in a twist of foil and get scattered at the desk.
- Prep 10 min
- Cook 20 min
- Serves 2
- Cost €
Method
- 1
Toast the breadcrumbs in 1 tbsp of the oil in a dry-ish pan over medium heat, stirring constantly, until deep gold. Tip them onto a plate straight away or they will keep cooking and burn.
5 min
- 2
Bring a large pot of well-salted water to the boil. Cook the cime di rapa for 4 minutes, then lift them out with a slotted spoon into a colander. Keep the water on the boil.
6 min
- 3
Cook the orecchiette in the same water. Meanwhile warm the remaining oil in a wide pan with the garlic and chilli over low heat until the garlic is pale gold, not brown.
11 min
- 4
Add the chickpeas with a pinch of salt and raise the heat. Press about a third of them against the pan with a fork so they break up and thicken the sauce. Let the rest crisp slightly.
5 min
- 5
Roughly chop the drained greens, add them to the pan, and turn everything over. Add the drained pasta with a ladleful of its water and toss hard until glossy.
2 min
- 6
Serve with the breadcrumbs scattered over at the table and a final thread of raw olive oil.
1 min
Variations
Broccoli, kale or chard all work in place of cime di rapa; they are less bitter, so add a squeeze of lemon at the end. Two anchovy fillets melted into the oil at step 3 make the classic Apulian version and lose the vegan flag. Butter beans instead of chickpeas are softer and creamier. A handful of toasted almonds with the breadcrumbs is very Sicilian and no longer nut-free. If you have no stale bread, dry fresh crumbs in the oven for 5 minutes first.