Ribollita: 3rd (or 4th) time's a charm

By now, you know Pamela Sheldon Johns, right? She's the American author of a whole shelf of Italian cookbooks who settled in Tuscany over ten years ago after she and her husband, an artist, bought an olive grove outside Montepulciano. Johns turned the guest house into a B & B, Poggio Etrusco, and began teaching cooking classes to groups of American visitors.

Her latest book, enthusiastically reviewed on Cornichon last month, is titled Cucina Povera. Unlike books filled with fancy recipes and exotic ingredients, it celebrates (if that's the right word) the simplest preparations, the cuisine of privation.

TheTuscan philosophy is exemplified by the successive uses of its basic vegetable soup, minestra di verdure. Gently sweat a sofrito of onions, carrots and celery in a bit of olive oil. One by one, add vegetables, from hard to soft: cavolo nero (dark kale, also called locinato), potatoes, broccoli stems, chopped stems of mustard greens, zucchini, the green leaves, eventually some roughly chopped canned tomatoes and cooked cannelini. Don't add liquid until the very end. Specific vegetables aren't as important as balance: sweet (herbs like parsely and celery), aromatic (thyme, fennel) and bitter (mustard greens).

If you add hot water or stock, the flavor stays in the vegetables. If you use cold water, the flavors will leach into the liquid. That's what you want.

The first day you have the minestra di verdura, your baseline vegetable soup, drizzled just before serving with extra virgin olive oil. The second day, you slice up your old, dried bread and layer it with the soup, and it becomes a minestra di pane. Tuscan bread is made without salt, so it dries out quickly. If you make this dish at home, you'll need to dry out your bread in a warm oven.

The third day, you add a bit more liquid and a bit more bread and bake it in the oven. That's minestra di pane al forno. It's the very incarnation of a country dish, flavorful and belly-filling, made from nothing, feeding both body and soul for days on end.

And on the fourth day, you take the leftover baked soup out of the pot, brown it in a skillet and eat it with a knife and fork. This is the ultimate ribollita, "recooked" vegetable stew.

Johns got as far as the "bread soup" stage at a two-hour cooking class last week at Diane's Market Kitchen in downtown Seattle. "You have so much more here in the Northwest than we do in Italy," Johns told her students, referring to the abundance of the farmers markets. It would have been unimaginable to the Tuscans she wrote about in Cucina Povera, who scraped by on nothing. And yet, they would agree with what the cobbler in Montepulciano said, "We were better off when we were worse off."

Diane's Market Kitchen, 1101 Post Avenue, Seattle, WA 98104 (206) 624-6114 
Poggio Etrusco via FoodArtisans.com

The Bittersweet Glory of Cucina Povera

Angelo Pellegrini, the sage of Seattle's culinary revolution in the 1960s, grew up in Tuscany, where he would gather up roadside cow pies and sell them for fuel to earn a few coins. That's hardly the boyhood one expects for a revered professor of literature at the University of Washington, but it was not an unusual story.

In the first half of the 20th century, southern Europe was racked by unimaginable poverty. Millions fled toward land they hoped could feed them; those left behind boiled and ate whatever they could find. And when there's literally nothing to eat, one invents. Vegetables, maybe, if they'll grow. Game, perhaps, if it's available (squirrel and possum on the North American continent), otherwise milk from a scrawny cow, flour milled from chestnuts or bread baked without salt because salt is too expensive.

What's remarkable is that those dark days, whose details are vividly recalled, decades later, by survivors at the end of their lifespan, produced a culinary culture that is nothing short of glorious. Their stories, as recounted by Pamela Sheldon Johns in her new book, Cucina Povera, "were sad, bitter and desperate." Almost every person she interviews says the same thing, "We had nothing to eat," yet their memories of the food they did have (and that enabled them to survive) were almost always pleasant.
This compilation, the food of hard times, the cooking of the poor, turns Cucina Povera (subtitled Tuscan Peasant Cooking) into the most positive book I've reviewed in years.

Johns is on a US tour this winter to promote her book and to teach private classes. She'll be in western Washignton for ten days in early March, and will teach a couple of classes at Dianne LaVonne's Market Kitchen (1101 Post Alley in Seattle) at 6 PM on March 7th and at noon on March 9th. There's still space for a couple of other classes; check the Food Artisans website.

To be fair to the long-established scholars, it's a landscape that's been plowed before, especially by Lynn Rossetto Kasper, another culinary writer (and public radio host) with Italian-American roots whose books have been honored by the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Half a generation ago, Rosetto Kasper called this the cooking of ingenuity. "You take what the land gives and you make something of it," she wrote in The Italian Country Table (1999).

Bread baked without salt dries out within a day, to be revived with wine or stock or olive oil, giving way to ribollita (bread soup), panzanella (bread salad) and bruschetta (toasted bread with toppings). As winter subsides, tomatoes ripen and their flavor explodes. Pigs become prosciutto (not to mention guanciale, porchetta, coppa, culatello, pancetta, mortadella, lardo, lombata, speck, salami and so on), milk becomes cheese (from fresh ricotta to aged Parmegiano). Fruit can be preserved with sweet grape must or honey if there's no refined sugar.

Cucina Povera is a collection of some five dozen recipes that should make the reader appreciate the ease of modern cooking as well as the depth of flavor that comes from unprocessed food. Johns is an American food writer who now lives on a farm in Tuscany, Poggio Etrusco, outside Montepulciano, where she teaches culinary workshops. Almost every recipe is accompanied by a deftly drawn profile of an Italian friend who recalls the days of true poverty. The ingredients are accessible, the methods are straightforward, the accumulation of the recipes is one of joy and plenty.

There's one for acquacotta, for example, that's a sort of stone soup: nothing but coarsely chopped vegetables for flavor, with a poached egg and a crust of crust of country bread. Dandelion greens or arugula leaves provide a savory filling for a six-egg frittata. A recipe for ricotta cheesecake needs only half a dozen ingredients (eggs, milk, sugar, lemons, flour, baking powder), can be assembled in 15 minutes, baked for 35, and enjoyed for dessert.

I admit to a couple of instances of confusion. I always thought "guanciale" refered specifically to the jowls of a pig, not cows. Sure, bovines have jowls, and restaurants (even in Seattle) offer dishes featuring beef cheeks. But it you're going to call something guanciale, it better be pork. Perhaps it's just a Tuscan thing.

Second, the classic white sauce of European cuisine--butter or oil, flour, milk or cream--is Béchamel in French, Besciamella in Italian, not "Balsamella." It's called Béchamel because its "inventor" was a specific historic personage, a 17th Century nobleman named Louis de Béchameil, the Marquis of Nointel. A velouté with a lot of milk or cream added. Again, perhaps it sounds like "Balsamella" in Tuscan dialect. Pseudo-Italian TV chef Emeril Lagasse calls it Balsamella, too, but that's probably what they call it on the Jersey Shore. ( (Indeed, Johns sent me a Facebook message, after this piece had run on Crosscut.com, saying that guanciale can refer to animals other than pigs, and that balsamella is what they call it where she lives.)

No discussion of this book would be complete without an enthusiastic endorsement of the photographs, by Andrea Wyner: portraits that evoke the hard lives the Tuscan elders have lived, as well as refreshing reinventions of Tuscany's landscapes.

Cucina Povera: Tuscan Peasant Cooking, by Pamela Sheldon Johns, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 186 pages, $21.99