I first encountered socca walking through the vieille ville (old town) in Nice in the mid-90s. During one twelve-month period I saw the chickpea pancake in numerous small cafes near Cours Saleya many times, but each time I was there, my traveling companions didn’t want to try the socca. To this day, I still have not eaten it.

A couple of winters ago, the two farmers from my favorite local farm came to dinner. Each brought me a one-pound bag of dried beans from their previous summer’s crop. The variety was one that I hadn’t heard of: King of the Early. I don’t use a lot of dried beans in my cooking, so these just sat on the shelf until the day I decided to see if I could make panisse by substituting these beans for chickpeas.

In order to make the replacement, I needed to grind the whole beans into flour. After burning out a cheap grinder, I managed to produce a sufficient amount of flour using an old Cuisinart mini-processor with its blade mounted backwards. I made the panisse using my normal recipe. The cooking went as usual, but the cooked product lacked the firmness required to brown the squares of the paste. The remaining bean flour went back on the shelf next to the unground beans.

A few months passed before I saw a recipe in my “recipes to try” folder for socca. Maybe it was time to try the bean flour again. Of course, instead of making a large crepe that my guests would tear apart with their fingers, mine would be bite-sized. I was able to reduce the recipe size so that the proportions given below produce about 12 individual crepes, each about 3-1⁄2 cm (1-3⁄8 in) in diameter.