An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

by Tamar Adler

Bread soup recipes are comically nitpicky about how stale and rugged their main ingredient must be. Authentic recipes for the French croûte au pot, which means “crust in a pot,” rigidly call not for stale bread but for only stale bread crusts to be cooked with the fat from a pot of boiling meat until they stick to their pot’s bottom, then served with the broth from the boiling pot ladled over the top. A recipe for onion bread soup from Simple French Cooking by Richard Olney demands stale bread that is “coarse, vulgar, compact.” We have all tossed loaves for meeting that description at some point. Stale bread cannot be bought. It must be waited for, which gives all dishes containing it the weight of philosophical ballast, as well as dietary and budgetary ones. Probably the most delicious bread soup is ribollita, the famous bread soup of Tuscany. As a Tuscan friend witheringly explained to me once, ribollita does not contain any procurable ingredients: “You don’t buy ingredients for ribollita. You have them.” Here is a recipe for a less than authentic ribollita. The truest ones require that you “have” the exact contents of the average Tuscan larder. Ribollita olive oil 1 medium onion, diced 2 cloves garlic, sliced 2 stalks celery, diced salt 1/2 cup fresh parsley and rosemary, roughly chopped 1/2 teaspoon chile flakes 3 peeled whole tomatoes 1 bunch leafy cooking greens like kale, Swiss chard, or collard greens, stemmed and chopped 1/4 cup water 2 cups cooked cranberry beans...