Orecchiette alle Cime di Rapa

Orecchiette alle cime di rapa is ear-shaped pasta tossed with bitter turnip tops, anchovy and garlic in olive oil. It's Puglia's pasta, and the bitterness of the greens is deliberately left in rather than cooked out — a version that mellows the turnip tops until they taste sweet has lost the flavour the dish is actually built around.

What it actually is

Turnip tops — the leafy green tops of the turnip plant, sharply bitter raw — boil briefly, often in the same pot the pasta will cook in afterward, to soften without losing all their bite. Anchovy melts into hot olive oil with garlic and a piece of dried chilli, and the boiled greens join that pan to finish cooking through, mashing slightly as they go. Orecchiette — small, ear-shaped pasta with a rough, absorbent surface — cooks in the same pot as the greens and tosses through everything together.

Cooking the pasta in the same water as the greens isn't a shortcut — it lets the pasta pick up a faint bitterness from the water itself, which ties the whole dish together rather than leaving the greens as a separate topping sitting on plain pasta.

How it's served

• Hot, tossed through, the greens mostly broken down into the sauce rather than left in whole leaves.
• With extra chilli or olive oil at the table for guests who want more.
• Without cheese in the traditional version, since the anchovy already provides the savoury depth.

Writing it on a menu

• Flag gluten and fish; the pasta and anchovy carry both.
• Say that the greens are deliberately bitter, since a guest unfamiliar with cime di rapa might expect a milder, sweeter vegetable.
• Note if you substitute broccoli rabe or another bitter green when turnip tops aren't available, since the flavour shifts slightly.
• Mention the anchovy, since it's easy to miss on a menu description listing mainly pasta and greens.