One of our favorite restaurants in Firenze, Italy, found entirely by word of mouth and now long gone, was called La Botteghina Rossa. Probably illegal and certainly unconventional, the restaurant consisted of a dingy living room across the Arno in the old Communist quarter, with a long picnic table that fit twenty (hopefully friendly) sardines for one seating a night.
The elderly Communist couple (both former Resistenti from the war) who owned the place and cooked every dish family-style spent every minute of their lives arguing furiously at the top of their lungs. The Italian language is perfect for argument and remonstration, and in the right setting, can make for great theater. An evening with this ancient couple was more an entertainment than a meal, but the meal itself was unfailingly fabulous.
We came away from our dinners at la Botteghina stuffed to the gills, with three dishes that stayed with us for life:
Kidney beans and onions, served in a clay pot with two entire heads of unpeeled garlic, split in half crosswise and sunk into the oil and vinegar for God knows how long.
Baked bell peppers, stuffed with a mixture of rice, herbs, beef, pork, and veal—the meat finely minced, not ground—and settled comfortably in a simple tomato sauce.
Minestra di pane rustica—a classic Tuscan Minestrone strewn with chunks of unsalted Tuscan peasant bread—a dish you could almost eat with a fork.
The first two were easy enough to duplicate—being more or less simple tweaks of the common recipes—but it was years before we came up with a minestra that justified our nostalgia. And the issue was never the soup, but the bread.
Pane rustica, the staple food for generations of Tuscan peasants, has a resilient, spongy, white interior and a strong, thick crust. When allowed to dry out slightly, it doesn't break down when immersed in liquids. And this distinguishes it from almost any other bread we've baked.
So essentially, we started with our basic Baguette parisienne recipe and declined to coddle it. No salt and no sugar—just flour, water, and yeast. The night before, we start by mixing a biga (a sponge in English—essentially one fourth of the total ingredients) and letting it sit until the next day. Then, plenty of strong kneading and pounding, followed by a long, unattended rising without the chef whimpering in the background. Formed into a boule or oval and baked on a pizza stone.
And much to our surprise, that was all it took.
For a more detailed version of the soup, check out the superb blog, Uova, Zucchero, e Farina. The recipe is in Italian, but run it through Google Translate in three or more gulps, and you'll see how easy it is to follow.
And to at least get you started, try the basic Pane Toscana recipe at King Arthur.
As for cooking music, today we’re thinking the Franco-Italian beauty Catherine Spaak (who passed away in April of this year), singing Non è niente from the movie La Calda Vita.