Ragù di pesce castagna con olive Cellina — Salento, Puglia

The dish belongs to the coastal cooking of the Salento, the southern peninsula of Puglia, where the fishing villages of the Ionian and Adriatic shores make sauces from the small rockfish of the inshore waters. Pesce castagna, the comber (Serranus cabrilla), is a modest fish of that catch, and the Cellina olive (Olea europaea, cultivar Cellina di Nardò) grows in the same country. The sauce is a household preparation of fishing families rather than a recipe of the professional kitchen.

Ragù di pesce castagna is a sauce of comber (Serranus cabrilla), a small, firm-fleshed rockfish, cooked slowly in olive oil and tomato with stoned Cellina olives until the fish breaks into flakes and the olives soften into the sauce. It is dressed onto orecchiette or sagne torte, the twisted ribbons of Salentine pasta, and served as a first course. The fish is cooked on the bone, which gives the sauce body, and the bones are removed before the flesh is returned to the pan.

The ragù is eaten with orecchiette or sagne torte, whose cupped and twisted shapes hold the flaked fish and olive pieces. The firm, slightly chewy durum pasta stands up to a sauce of marked flavour. A dry white wine of Salento with good acidity, or a light rosato from Negroamaro, suits it, since the acidity cuts the olive oil and the bitterness of the olives. The comber has a more pronounced marine flavour than white fish such as sea bass, and the Cellina olive answers it with moderate bitterness and green fruit.