Recipes & Lore • Bakery Counter Canon

Spinach Pies

Name: Rhode Island Spinach Pies
Prep time: 30 min
Cook time: 25 min
Total time: 55 min
Yield: 6 spinach pies
Cuisine: Italian-American (Rhode Island)
Ingredients: 1 pound pizza dough, at room temperature; 2 pounds fresh spinach (or 20 ounces frozen, thawed and squeezed very dry); 3 tablespoons olive oil, plus more for brushing; 4 cloves garlic, sliced; 1/2 cup pitted black olives, chopped; 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper; Salt to taste

Everywhere else in America, a folded pocket of pizza dough is a calzone. In Rhode Island, when it's filled with garlicky sautéed spinach, black olives, and crushed red pepper — traditionally no cheese — it's a spinach pie, and it lives on the same bakery counter as the pizza strips and the pepper biscuits, sold in wax paper, eaten warm or room temperature, no plate required. It's lunch, it's a beach snack, it's what you grab "for the ride."

You need

1 lb pizza dough, room temperature
2 lb fresh spinach (or 20 oz frozen, thawed and squeezed very dry)
3 tbsp olive oil, plus more for brushing
4 cloves garlic, sliced
½ cup pitted black olives, chopped
½ tsp crushed red pepper; salt to taste

Method

Sauté the garlic in the oil until fragrant, add the spinach, and cook until wilted and dry — water is the enemy of the bottom crust. Stir in olives, red pepper, and salt. Cool completely and squeeze once more.
Heat the oven to 400°F. Divide the dough into 6 and stretch each piece into a thin oval.
Mound filling on half of each oval, fold, and pinch the seam shut. No vents. A bakery spinach pie is soft and pale-gold, not blistered and crackly — resist your pizza instincts.
Brush lightly with olive oil and bake 20–25 minutes, until just golden.
Rest at least 15 minutes. Room temperature is not a compromise; it's the serving suggestion.

The lore: The spinach pie is the calzone's Rhode Island name and Rhode Island attitude — a Neapolitan bakery idea carried over in the great Italian immigration and kept plain, portable, and cheap. Its most famous descendant lives at Caserta Pizzeria, the Federal Hill institution slinging pizza since 1953: the "Wimpy Skippy," a spinach pie stuffed with mozzarella and pepperoni, named for two regulars — nicknamed Wimpy and Skippy — who'd come back from a night out, pool what money was left, and doctor a plain spinach pie into something more substantial. The owner put it on the menu; Rhode Island did the rest. Purists note, correctly, that once the cheese and pepperoni go in you've built a calzone — but nobody on Spruce Street is interested in that argument.

Sources & further reading

Send the bakery counter

A spinach pie wants to be eaten the day it's baked — but the shelf-stable Rhode Island canon ships anywhere, packed in the Rhode Island Survival Kit.

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