Erica De Mane

Sophia with a ricotta-filled beehive.

Recipe: Chicken Torta with Pistachios and Capers

I’m attracted to containers—suitcases stuffed with old photos, beehive hairdos filled with balled-up netting to make them high and mighty (or, in the case of some of my more high-strung high school classmates,  concealing Kotex studded with razor blades, and that was on Long Island in the 1970s, if you can believe it). In the culinary world this translates into food rolled and stuffed or made into tight packages—ravioli, involtini, cannoli, torta, calzone, anything with a wrapping and a surprise inside. That is one of the reasons that I love Southern Italian food. They’re into packets.

The savory pies of Southern Italy are one of my culinary passions. Torta and pasticcio are a few of the names they go by, and there are many, for different styles and places of origin. They can be over-the-top elaborate, swollen with every showoff ingredient Southern Italy has to offer, such as the timballo, made famous in Guiseppe di Lampedusa’s brilliant but for long stretches almost unreadable novel Il Gattopardo. The timballo is a dish born of Sicilian nobility, a pastry-covered dome filled with macaroni, truffles, hard-boiled eggs, ham, chicken livers, sausage, and cheese, seasoned with cinnamon and sugar and moistened with a French demi-glace. Tancredi, the novel’s main character, describes the pastry, as it’s sliced open, as revealing “glistening macaroni” the “exquisite hue of suede.” I’ve always found that description incredibly enticing, but the dish is not one I’ve ever wanted to throw together, being more of a cucina povera girl. However ,within that humbler category there luckily lies a treasure trove of riches.

A torta can be as simple as two rounds of pizza dough stretched thin and filled with a stringy pasta fillata kind of cheese such as Ragusano, or it can be the fattening and glorious pizza rustica, an Easter specialty in many parts of the Mezzogiorno, made with a sweet pasta frolla pastry that encases a firm filling of ricotta with pecorino or caciocavallo and prosciutto or little chunks of soppressata, all baked until golden and eaten at room temperature so that every flavor bursts in your mouth.

The chicken pasticcio I decided I needed to cook is my version of a recipe that originally appeared in Jo Bettoja’s Southern Italian Cooking:  Recipes from the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, one of my all-time favorite cookbooks (shop for it at Amazon here). It’s a double crusted pie made with a sweet, buttery crust, filled with braised chicken and flavored with almonds, pistachios, and capers, three of Sicily’s most honored foodstuffs. It reminds me a little of a Moroccan bisteya, and being Sicilian, it could very well share some common ancestry.

I decided to skip the rich pasta frolla crust and go with a simple olive oil dough, one that I always use for pizza di scarola and other vegetable tortas. I’ve monkeyed around with the filling as well, not understanding the huge amount of moist breadcrumbs Jo Bettoja’s recipe called for (a few years back, when I made it exactly as proscribed, the taste was fabulous but the texture was a bit gummy). I eliminated all but about a tablespoon of breadcrumbs and added a little grana Padano to stabilize the filling in what I find to be a more contemporary way. Since I’ve taken some of the formality out of this recipe, I call it not a pasticcio but a torta, a name that for me connotes a simpler preparation—one that I hope you’ll find delicious.

Chicken Torta with Pistachios and Capers

(Serves 6)

For the pastry:

2½ cups all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon sugar
The grated zest from 1 lemon
⅔ cup white wine
⅔ cup extra-virgin olive oil

For the filling:

Extra-virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt
Black pepper
A few big scrapings of nutmeg
4 allspice, ground to a powder
5  chicken thighs, skinned
1 large shallot, minced
½ cup white wine
½ cup chicken broth
½ cup lightly toasted whole shelled pistachios, roughly chopped
¼ cup tiny capers, rinsed
The juice from 1 lemon
1 tablespoon dry breadcrumbs
½ cup grated grana Padano cheese
2 large eggs, lightly beaten
A handful of flat leaf parsley leaves, lightly chopped

Plus, 1 egg, lightly beaten with a little water, to brush over the pastry

In a large bowl, mix the flour with the salt and sugar. Add the lemon zest to the wine, and pour it over the flour. Add the olive oil. Mix briefly, until you have a sticky ball. Turn it out onto a work surface, and knead it very briefly, about a minute or so. Wrap it in plastic wrap and let it rest, unrefrigerated, for about an hour.

In the meantime, set up large skillet over medium heat. Add 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Sprinkle the chicken thighs with sugar, salt, black pepper, nutmeg, and the allspice, and add them to the skillet, browning them on broth sides. Add the shallot, and sauté until soft. Add the white wine, and let it bubble for a few seconds. Add the chicken broth, lower the heat, cover the skillet, and simmer until just tender, about 20 minutes. Take the  chicken from the skillet, and let it cool, keeping the skillet juices in the pan.

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.

Pull the meat off the chicken, and shred it into small pieces. Discard the bones, and put the chicken back into the skillet with the juices. Add all the other ingredients for the filling, seasoning it well with more salt and black pepper if needed.

Lightly oil a 9-inch tart pan with a removable bottom. Cut the dough in two pieces, leaving one piece a bit smaller.

Roll out the bigger piece of dough, and drape it into the pan, leaving some overhang. Fill the pan with the chicken mixture. Roll out the other half, and place it on top, leaving some overhang. Pinch the edges of the dough together, and then trim them all around, more or less neatly. Poke a few air holes in the top, and brush it with the egg wash.

Bake about 40 minutes. The top should be golden and the edges lightly browned. Let cool at least 10 minutes before slicing (you can be serve it warm or at room temperature). Serve wedges of it with a green salad and a glass of Sicily’s grillo wine.