Coca: The Flatbread of Valencia, Catalonia, and the Balearics
In a bakery display case in Alicante, eight round flatbreads sat on a single wooden board and no two were the same: cheese, ham, peppers and sausage, onion. A single label hung above them.
Coca is a flatbread from the Catalan-speaking part of Spain - dough with the topping spread over it or tucked between two sheets, savory or sweet, baked on a tray and sold by the piece; under that one word, Spanish cuisine keeps not a single recipe but a whole family.
What Coca Means and Where It's Baked
In the Valencian dictionary the word coca has plenty of company: it also means a blow, the coca shrub and, colloquially, Coke. In a bakery there's no risk of confusion: coca is always the one off the baking tray. Linguists trace it to the same root as English cake and German Kuchen, which came down from the north by way of Occitan; even Coromines, the author of the Catalan etymological dictionary, isn't certain about it. The geography is simpler than the etymology: coca belongs to the whole Catalan-speaking Mediterranean - Catalonia bakes coca de recapte with roasted peppers, eggplant and onion, the Balearics coca de trempó with summer vegetables, the Aragonese borderlands call the same thing coc, and Valencia and Alicante have their own tuna and streusel versions. The cousins live just beyond the language border: in Nice, French cuisine has pissaladière with caramelized onions and anchovies and no tomatoes, and Italian pizza rustica is a closed savory pie much like the Alicante tuna coca, only with cheese and ham inside.
Coca, Naples and the Argument over Pizza's Origins
The version you hear most often is a modest one: bread dough that failed to rise didn't get thrown out - the cook rolled it flat, added whatever was at hand and baked it. The fame came much later and from somewhere else. At the end of 2023, the chef José Andrés publicly backed the claim that pizza grew out of coca, brought to Naples in the fifteenth century by the Valencian soldiers of Alfonso the Magnanimous, and for a few weeks the Spanish press had a quarrel with Italy on its hands. It rests on a single doctoral thesis; food historians see coca and pizza more as two cousins descended from the same Mediterranean flatbread, one that Rome already knew. Alicante has a chapter of its own, though, and a better documented one: coca amb tonyina is baked here for the feast of Saint John, when the streets fill with giant fogueres figures built only to be burned, and every June the province's bakers' guild and the city council run a competition for the best one. A city that holds an official competition for a tuna pie doesn't need a theory about where pizza came from.
Onion, Tuna and Streusel: What Goes into an Alicante Coca
The dough is a modest thing and often does without yeast: flour, olive oil, salt and white wine in place of some of the water, which is what keeps the sheet crisp once it's baked. Onion is the star of the tuna coca - it cooks down slowly until it turns sweet, and the canned tuna and pine nuts go in at the very end, more as a seasoning than as meat; then a second sheet goes over the filling, pricked all over, brushed with egg and into the oven. Coca de mollitas takes the opposite route and has no filling at all: a second, richer dough of flour, oil and wine is crumbled over a thin crisp base and stays loose and sandy in the oven. It's the streusel we scatter over a quark cake back home in Czechia, only savory and with no cake underneath - in Alicante they also call it a savory polvorón, after the crumbly Christmas cookie.
Bakeries sell coca by the piece, and during the fiestas by the quarter- or half-tray, and the mollitas one is an everyday breakfast in Alicante. The tuna coca has its ritual: on the night the figures go up, people eat it with wine and finish the meal with a bowl of bitter chicory, which cuts through all that sweet onion. If you want to taste the one the whole city is talking about, come in June: the bakers' guild announces the winner a few days before the feast, and after that the line outside the winning bakery will show you the way.
Three Bakeries, Three Cocas
I bought coca three times in Alicante, each time somewhere else (see Where to Eat in Alicante). I started with the most famous one: the tuna coca from the Mari Carmen Fenoll stall on the lower floor of the central market, the one they say wins them competitions. It was superb - thin crisp sheets, sweet and almost creamy onion between them and tuna as a salty undertone. The vegetable one from the La Masa de Tomasa II bakery was excellent: soft, with peppers and tomato cooked down like a stew and a dark layer of vegetables roasted until brown. And then came coca de mollitas from Panadería Dorita, the one they're proudest of here. Dry dough scattered with dry streusel wasn't for me; every bite called for something to drink. So the coca Alicante is proudest of never grew on me. The other two I didn't have to get used to at all.
