In short. The most Salentine dish there is: pasta with chickpeas in which part of the pasta is fried instead of boiled and added back at the end. That contrast — soft and crisp in the same bowl — is the whole idea.
Tria is the old name for the local pasta of Lecce, and it is far older than it looks: the word comes from Arabic, and the dish is one of the oldest recorded pasta preparations in Italy.
Ingredients
- 300 g of tria — the typical pasta of Lecce
- 250 g of chickpeas
- 1 white onion
- 2 sticks of celery
- 3 bay leaves
- extra virgin olive oil, salt
Method
1. The night before. Leave the chickpeas to soak, with a little bicarbonate of soda.
2. Cooking the chickpeas. The next day, cook them over a low heat in a pot of water with the bay leaves and some salt.
3. The two pastas. Boil 250 g of the tria in plenty of water with the celery. The rest is fried in oil until amber-coloured, then drained and set aside.
4. Bringing it together. In a large pan soften a finely minced onion — take care not to burn it, it should only go golden. Add the fried pasta, the boiled pasta and the chickpeas. Mix well, wait a couple of minutes, and serve hot.
Why fry part of the pasta? Because it was there before anyone had an oven at home: frying was how you got crunch. The fried pieces stay crisp for a few minutes in the bowl and then slowly soften — which is why this dish is served the moment it is assembled.
More on the first courses page.
