Pizza Bianca con Fichi

For most of the year this sandwich cannot be made at all. It exists only in the weeks when the settembrini are dropping in the hills above Rome, the small purple-black figs no bigger than a walnut that ripen in late summer, because the whole pleasure of the bite is one of those figs pressed soft and fully ripe into warm bread before its flesh has had time to dry. From August into October the windows of the Roman forni carry it; outside that span the figs are gone and the build goes with them. Hothouse fruit flown in from elsewhere lacks the inner syrup and the perfumed seeded flesh the late-summer fig brings to the counter, so an off-season version stocked at a tourist bakery is something else wearing the same name.

In season, the assembly is quick and done by hand. A length of pizza bianca comes off the tray, opened lengthwise with a single cut, and three or four sheets of prosciutto di Parma are laid across the cut face. The figs come out of a low basket beside the counter, split with the thumbs, and pressed open halves cut-side-down into the prosciutto. The bread closes over them, wrapped in greaseproof and handed across while it is still warm: the fig pulp wetting the slice from inside, the prosciutto fat slackening against the heat, the three components already beginning to fuse before the first bite.

Each part carries the bread's missing weight, because the pizza bianca itself is deliberately plain. It is Roman white flatbread, made with a long fermentation, baked on the hearth at 300 degrees Celsius, brushed with olive oil and coarse salt before the oven, drawn out blistered and golden with an open crumb and a thin crisp top. No tomato, no cheese, no rosemary in the figs version. The bread is salt and crust and air, and it hands its sweetness and its fat off to the figs and the prosciutto. Stripped of either one, a side of the contrast falls: the figs alone are a sweet jammed mess in a flatbread, the prosciutto alone a cold-cut sandwich on a salt loaf with no reason to be built this way.

The bite fails on temperature and on the fruit. Bread cooled too long leaves the prosciutto fat solid and the fig sitting as a separate cold pad, nothing melting at the seam. Straight from the oven and the fig blisters while the prosciutto turns to a single greasy layer. Figs picked underripe go grainy and the bite is bread with chewy fruit in it; figs picked too ripe collapse when the bread closes and the parcel comes back to the table as a purple stain on white paper. The cut face presses too thin and tears under the figs' juice, or too thick and the build reads as bread with toppings stuck on rather than one mouthful. A working version uses a length pulled within the last twenty minutes from the oven, prosciutto laid first to film the bread with fat, figs split and pressed open-face into it, the parcel closed and eaten standing.

At the counter the grammar is short and seasonal. Pizza con prosciutto e fichi is the order on the card from late August through October; the customer asks for una pizza con prosciutto e fichi, the shop weighs the length cut off the tray, the prosciutto comes off the slicer behind the counter at fifty grams or so, and the figs go in by hand. At Forno Campo de' Fiori the figs come from suppliers in the Castelli Romani who grow the small dark settembrini on the lower hills above the city; at other Roman bakeries they come from the markets in Piazza Vittorio or from the dawn delivery vans up from the same hills. The build is sold by the etto, the etto being one hundred grams, the way bread and cured meat have been sold by weight in Roman fornaie for a century. The Roman repertoire keeps a small set of split-flatbread builds alongside it, each written up under its own slug: the same flatbread with mortadella, with prosciutto crudo on its own, and an early-summer relative built on grapes baked into the dough, the Tuscan schiacciata con l'uva; the figs build sits in this set as one of three classics, with a stracciatella-and-figs version newly appearing at younger shops.

Older than the bakery itself

The Roman pizza bianca is older than the fig fold above. The Forno Campo de' Fiori in central Rome opened in 1819 and has made the same blistered salt-and-oil flatbread on the same site through three full Roman centuries, and the bakery is taken as the documentary anchor for the modern version of the bread.

The figs build is a seasonal habit rather than a dated invention. The settembrini of the Castelli Romani and the lower hills above Rome ripen in late August and through September, with a second smaller flush sometimes lasting into October, and the glut in those weeks runs heavy enough that Roman fornaie have used the fruit as a cheap topping for as long as the modern flatbread has existed. The pairing of figs with cured pork reaches back much further: Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia of 77 AD, recorded the Roman habit of fattening pigs on fallen figs to sweeten the meat, and figs-and-pork has been a staple of Latium cooking ever since.

The figs leave the menu the week the last settembrini drop in October. Forno Campo de' Fiori, at Piazza Campo de' Fiori 22, has baked the same blistered flatbread on the same site since 1819, and Pliny's note on fig-fed Roman pork, set down in Naturalis Historia in 77 AD, sits behind every August fig parcel the bakery still chalks onto its slate.