In a 1976 book, the writer and professor Pasquale Di Ciaccio dedicated these words to the Tiella di Gaeta: «We eat it in quarters, without pieces of cutlery. There is no taste if you don't take it between your fingers».
A popular dish par excellence: two discs of pasta based on flour, yeast, extra virgin olive oil, water and salt. Filled with all sorts of padding, from sea products to those of the land.
A story born just around the Gulf of the Lazio city, in the province of Latina. Here, at the beginning of the 19th century, the first evidence of Tiella production was found (although the name, from the Latin tigella, suggests a much older origin). Like many dishes of popular cuisine, Tiella was born for practical needs: consuming excess flour present in the granarys and unsold fish of the day.
Ph. Enrico Nocera - Trentaremi
So the idea of mixing flour with water, oil, yeast and salt came out. The soft dough obtained was then divided into two parts to get the disks to be stuffed with the filling. A popular proverb says that the recipe was perfected in this way by Ferdinand IV of Bourbon. The sovereign, as he used to do in the streets of the Santa Lucia district in Naples, loved to spend his days with the people of Gaeta during his travels in the village. Maybe disguising himself as a fisherman or peddler.
Ph. Enrico Nocera
It was during one of these days that he saw some housewives working pasta disks as if they were pizzas. Astonished by their ability, he had the idea of “doubling” the layer to get, in this way, a sort of stuffed pizza that he defined as «first, second and third dish», to underline its characteristics as a very well-seasoned dish. So much so that, more than 150 years later, Di Ciaccio himself continued to describe the Tiella in this way: «Our ancestors preferred it seasoned abundantly. The oil - they said - must have been able to flow on the forearms. In fact, they rolled up their sleeves before sitting at the table».
Ph. Enrico Nocera
So a good Tiella must be compact, with a damp filling, soft, thin, well cooked and - above all – dry filling in the external dough. Not even a drop of its filling should flow from the pasta disk.
But what do we stuff the Tiella with? There are no specific prescriptions: the ingredients are the most varied. From squid to cod, from escarole to octopus. The latter is the most representative of the recipe, to underline the essential relationship between Gaeta and the sea, still full of fishermen who bring their boats offshore at dawn.
Ph. Enrico Nocera
After the fall of the Bourbon Kingdom and during the first years of the 1900s, a period of great migrations, the Tiella became an identity food: what Gaetan farmers prepared and ate around the world. The memory of the granaries, the grinding, the nets lowered into the sea came to life again between those two disks of dough cooked in the oven and wrapped in aluminum foil.