Ribolita: Tuscan Bread Soup or My Perfect Food

For reasons that I have never fully understood, nearly 20 years ago I found myself boarding a plane and flying off to live for a time in Florence.  I am not Italian.  I have no strong childhood memories of Italian food or culture.  Even so, ever since that trip, Italy, its language, hills and most of all its food, has had a firm hold on my soul.  Of all the things I lived and learned in Italy – the purity of Tuscan roads by bike, the power of a Renaissance canvas in a darkened church lit only by a single lamp – it is the food that stays with me.  Florence defined food for me, a whole new lexicon of taste that rewrote who I am and how I live.  Before that time I never really tasted food or cooked.  Standing behind my adopted Tuscan Mama, Rina Maschalchi, following her every move, I became a chef.  Among the culinary marvels of that most simple and rustic food, the humblest of them all stands out – ribollita.

My own experience with ribollita began in Signora Maschalchi’s kitchen.  The occasion was a Maschalchi birthday.  Marked with the long table of our often communal meals, a large window that opened onto the nearby piazza, and little else, the kitchen was all spare economy.  A little fridge, a little stove, a little sink, a few cabinets and pots.  Enough for their needs.  

As with many things that we view as Italian food, ribollita is many things to many different people.  At its most basic, ribollita is a concept.  A kind of savory bread pudding based on vegetable soup, white cannellini beans, the intense black kale called cavolo nero, and chunks of saltless pane tipo Toscano. Ribollita is the essence of frugality, the purest expression of “la cucina povera,” the cuisine of poverty, forged out of desperate times with, frankly, desperate ingredients.  The hallmark of ribollita is the ability to take leftovers, what would otherwise be thrown away  – in this case cooked white beans, day-old vegetable soup, stale bread – and make it into something sublime and  stretch it into one more meal.  

Ribollita stirs something primal in Tuscans, it is true soul food and there is little better to mark something as fundamental as a birthday.  Making ribollita takes both time and love, elements lavished with intensity on any proper celebration.  While ribollita may be the ultimate comfort food for Tuscans, it is also symbolic of past deprivations and the modern family with the modern excesses does not need so much as want ribollita. 

On the day of the birthday Rina puts these elements together, the leftover beans, the bread, the love, and distills them into something wholly new.  The irony of ribollita for Tuscans, and for those adopted souls inhabiting their space for a time, is that eating the soup is still a meal in Tuscany.  And that means you eat it with . . . more Tuscan bread.  You eat ribollita with red wine bought from the “farmer” and carried home in a 50 liter vat.  You eat ribollita covered with opaque, almost neon green olive oil that is fresh from another “farmer” and that tastes like grass and the countryside, yet still is identifiably olive.  

The first bite of ribollita is odd.  The texture is smooth, almost silky, and yet still with a density on the tongue that is surprising.   You can taste the coarse vegetal kale, and the creamy beans, and the broth, with a bit of bright tomatoey-ness sneaking through.  The whole is rich and intense, layered with fresh olive oil and balanced by the dark-red intensity of the local wine.  Ribollita tastes like what it is, an amalgam of love and soul and leftovers, little bits of everything sewn together into a vivid tapestry of the perfect food.

Stay tuned.