Ceci | Three Ingredients and a Fire

The chickpea circle they bake twice a week next door

The first one I saw was sitting on the counter at Da Osvá, our local pizzeria, like something nobody had finished. A plain circle the color of a low winter sun, crusted and blistered across the top, no cheese, no tomato, no oil slick, no anything, parked between the pizzas where it had no business being.

Da Osvá is next to our front door, close enough that we are there more than we admit. It is not a restaurant. It is a wood oven, a counter, five tables, a few more chairs out on the street when it is warm, and a fridge of beer and soda you open yourself. Alessandro runs it with his family, and Alessandro trained in Rome, which is why the pizza is Naples-style and very good, and why the flour comes in a box so expensive-looking that for a while I assumed it was a Gucci box that had wandered into the wrong shop.

We asked what the circle was. Ceci, he said. He makes it twice a week, almost always to order, and that one already belonged to somebody. We could not have it. So we booked the ne…