Make Soup From Nothing

So much of Italian food relies on making the most out of very little. They even have a specific name for it, cucina povera—peasant cooking. There are countless dishes that fall under this title, but perhaps the quickest route to understanding it is to make some soup. After all, the soup pot was traditionally the daily recipient of whatever vegetables one could gather for the day, even when that was nothing more than a meager handful of grass and weeds. I’m not joking; in Tuscany there’s a soup called acquacotta, which translates as „cooked water,“ and on the most miserable days, it was hardly more than that.

You don’t have to make a lean and watery acquacotta to express your solidarity with Tuscan peasants, but you can cook up a basic minestrone, which can, and should, vary with whatever seasonal produce you’re able to find. Making minestrone should be less about the recipe and more of a practice, one that can be as complicated or as straightforward as you desire. Simply sauté some vegetables in olive oil, add water, then add other vegetables to simmer. Herbs, beans, pasta, or whatever you want can round it out.

Move On To Ribollita

When you’re done with that, move on to ribollita, a Tuscan bread soup that was originally a method of stretching yesterday’s leftover minestrone into a hearty meal for the next day, simply by adding stale bread. Today, you can make it all at once from start to finish, without doing the whole leftover-soup thing first, though there’s no reason you couldn’t actually extend your minestrone dregs if it happened to work out that way (pinospizzeria).

Beyond that, another bread soup, tomatoey pappa al pomodoro, helps to underscore just what a powerful weapon bread can be, while a classic bowl of pasta e fagioli demonstrates both how delicious nicely cooked dried beans can be and how a single ingredient can do double duty, with the beans acting as both the thickener of the broth and the chunky bits suspended in it.