Pissaladière — Italy

Pissaladière is a savory tart built on a base of bread dough, generously covered with onions cooked down slowly until soft and sweet, and finished with anchovies or pissalat (a paste made from salted fish), olive oil, and small black olives. The onions are cooked without letting them brown, so the topping stays pale and mellow rather than caramelized. This version is reported from Italy, where it is closely related to pissalandrea, also called pizza all'Andrea, a dish of Ligurian cuisine cooked just across the border from Nice. The dish is referenced on both sides of the border, in Italy and in France, each with its own page here, and neither is presented as the one the other descends from. To prepare it, a simple bread dough is left to rise, then stretched thin over a baking tray or into a shallow pan. Sliced onions are cooked very slowly in olive oil until soft and translucent, without coloring, then spread evenly over the dough. Anchovy fillets are arranged over the onions in a lattice or scattered pattern, small black olives are dotted across the surface, and the whole tart is baked until the edges are set and lightly colored. This Italian rendition leans on the Ligurian habit of using whole anchovy fillets rather than a smooth pissalat paste, and often bakes the dough a touch thicker than its neighboring versions, giving a more bread-like base under the onion topping.