The pissaladière is one of the oldest culinary specialties of the region of Nice,
found throughout the maritime Provence.
It is indeed a great classic of the cuisine of the County of Nice, as well as pan-bagnat, the salad niçoise and the socca. The ‘pissaladièra’, as it is called in nissart, is mainly made with local products. As it is nowadays tasted, it consists of bread dough, onions, olives, anchovies and olive oil. The pissaladière could be a legacy of a Genoese recipe and the recipe is passed down from generation to generation in Nice families.
The first written traces of the pissaladière date from the nineteenth century, under the name of ‘pissalat à la niçoise’. The dough, before being baked, was brushed with this puree of fish. Although true lovers remain faithful to the tradition of pissalat, many have replaced it with cream or anchovy fillets because it is difficult to obtain.
It is sometimes considered a variant of pizza. The pissaladière is made with bread dough, but does not include tomato. In addition to bread dough, it is mainly composed of a bed of onions that must cook for a long time, with very soft fires, to ‘compote’. Bread dough and onion may be enough, but the real pissaladière can not be made without pissalat, a sort of paste or salted cream, made from anchovy and poutine fry, macerated in salt for several months, who gave his name to the specialty.
Increasingly, the pissalat is replaced by anchovy cream or anchovy fillets. Finally, it is customary to add to the pissaladière black olives, flakes (small black olives of Nice).
