Canned Tomatoes and Stale Bread Never Tasted So Good
Tuscany’s “cooked water” shows just how deliciously simple ingredients can be transformed.
If we’re being honest, “cooked water” probably is the least alluring way to sell a recipe. But as so often is the case with the cucina povera of Italy, neither the name nor the simple ingredients do justice to what ends up on your plate.
“Tuscan cooking has a lot of respect for leftovers,” Giulia Scarpaleggia explained as she glugged olive oil into a pot. We were enjoying wine in the sunny kitchen of her home in Colle di Val d’Elsa. The same home her father and grandmother were born in and still share with her, her husband and their daughter.
She’d offered to teach me acquacotta, a classic Tuscan soup that somehow extracts richness from spare this-and-thats. The name translates simply as cooked water. For good measure, they add stale bread. Still not sold? Stay with me.
“Acquacotta comes from Maremma, a poor land that was marshlands. It really represents how poor the land was,” Scarpaleggia, a cookbook author, explained. I know... Still not selling it. At all.
Into the pot, she added diced celery and onion. Most Italian soups start with those plus carrot, but carrots were too rich for Maremma, a coastal area of Tuscany. Red pepper flakes, garlic and salt went next.
This mix cooked down, sweetening as it softened, for 15 minutes. As it sizzled, Scarpaleggia explained she’d learned the recipe by simply knocking on a farmhouse door at the direction of a local vegetable seller. “She welcomed us into her house and she gave us four or five recipes,” she said.
Next, tomatoes. It’s always refreshing to see that even in Italy canned tomatoes often are the first choice. They defy seasonality. Using her hands, she crushed two cans of plum tomatoes into the pot, then let everything simmer until thick and reduced by half. A hunk of Parmesan rind, too.
She used a spoon to create divots in the soup, then cracked an egg into each. It was starting to resemble shakshuka, minus peppers and spice.
Spooned over toasted stale bread, the whole affair is... beautiful! A chunky, boldly red sauce slowly softening crispy-toasty bread, the runny egg yolk sliding over it all, topped by pecorino shavings. It was robust and somehow fresh. It was intense, actually, thanks to being reduced, all those simple flavors concentrated.
Simple ingredients. Simple prep. As ever, amounting to so much more than their simplicity suggests.
