Minestra from servizio di cucina (hot peasant soup)
Zuppa di pane, cavolo nero e fave
EverydayReconstruction🧂 🍄 ☕facile1 h (plus soaking)
A thick and hearty soup where stale bread acts as a thickener, combined with slightly bitter Tuscan black kale and tender fava beans. The bread swells in the broth flavored with olive oil and garlic: a poor man's dish that warms and satisfies.
Minestra from servizio di cucina (hot peasant soup)
A thick and hearty soup where stale bread acts as a thickener, combined with slightly bitter Tuscan black kale and tender fava beans. The bread swells in the broth flavored with olive oil and garlic: a poor man's dish that warms and satisfies.
Do not mistake this peasant bowl. In the morning I mark my timber in the forest, and in the evening, mud-splattered, I sit at the inn with the butcher and the miller; we play dice, we quarrel with coarse words, and they serve me this soup where yesterday's bread is revived in the broth. Break your dry crust at the bottom of the bowl, pour over the new oil and the bitter kale, let it swell: this is how a man fallen from affairs learns that an honest pot is worth more than the flatteries of a court. Eat hot, and keep your mind cool.
Ingredients
- •Country bread, stale (unsalted, Tuscan style) — several hard slices (thickener and base)
- •Cavolo nero (Tuscan black kale) — one bunch (main vegetable, bitter note)
- •Fresh or soaked dried fava beans — a generous handful (protein and binder)
- •New Tuscan olive oil — generously (fat and flavor)
- •Garlic — a few cloves (aromatic)
- •Onion — one (aromatic base)
- •Salt — to taste (seasoning)
How it was made : Tuscan 'sciocco' bread (unsalted) keeps poorly once stale, hence a whole cuisine designed to recycle it: crumbled into soups, 'rebooted' the next day. The lower classes supplemented with Old World legumes (fava beans, chickpeas, lentils) — definitely not cannellini beans, which came from America and were unknown in Machiavelli's time.