Some else wrote to me recently about this pie. Her’s was a bit different, more like a calzone but with more or less the same filling. Her family was also from a town around Bari. It sounds lovely. I’m going to look through my blog posts and see where that note was just to see if she or I found an actual name for this pie. If I do I’ll let you know.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Erica

My mum is was born in Molfetta (and later immigrated to Australia) and makes us this onion, cauliflower, olive, spring onion, white fish and tomato pie every Christmas and Easter (and sometimes throughout the year when we are craving it!!). It’s made with a yeast dough (flour, fresh yeast, boiled potatoes that have been sqashed to form a mashy consistency and some salted tepid water). The mixture is made the day before with sauteed spring onions, cauliflower and fresh tomato. When assembling the pie, place a sheet of the dough on the bottoom of a baking pan, then place the onion mixture in the pie, then sprinkle over homemade pitted green olives and crumbled white fish (which has been lightly panfried). Place another sheet of the dough over the top, fold in the edges and then make a whole in the centre and blow into it (weird but apparently very necessary!!). yYummm

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There are many versions of calzones or two crusted pies containing fish in Southern Italy, many from Puglia. Sicily has a bunch of them. I included one called Impanata di Pesce Spada, which contains swordfish and sometimes cauliflower, in my book ‘Flavors of Southern Italy’. I hunted around to try and find a recipe for the exact calzone from Molfetta that you asked about but couldn’t come up with it exactly. I’m assuming it’s made with a yeast crust, not a short crust. Nancy Harmon Jenkins in her book ‘Cucina del Sole’ has a Neapolitan version of a fish pie that sounds great and contains many of the ingredients you mentioned (not cauliflower though) This combination of flavors is very popular in Puglia and actually throughout the waterside towns in the South. I’ll keep looking around to see if I can find something more specific. It’s often hard to track down these types of recipes since they’re very improvisational and everyone makes them a little differently, but this is certainly a very typical type of dish from the Bari area.

I’ll let you know if I find out more.

THanks for you note.

Erica