On Food That Makes Do

It began, as many things do, with public radio.

I'm a huge fan of NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!, and of their blog and of their blog's Sandwich Monday feature, wherein they eat a sandwich -- usually a disgusting one -- every Monday.

Last Monday's sandwich was the Toast Sandwich, which is literally "a slice of toast seasoned with salt and pepper, between two pieces of bread with butter."

I posted it on facebook, as I often do with Sandwich Monday sandwiches, and a friend of mine -- a friend with a legitimate, high powered, grown-up respectable job, said this:

Friend with legitimate, high powered, grown-up respectable job: One aspires to the toast sandwich after the "sugar sandwich," "tangwich," and "syrup sandwich" aka "hood pancakes."

Me: I saw an old Law & Order this weekend wherein part of Lisa Gay Hamilton's reason for killing her husband was that her mother used to send them to school with "Mashed Potato Sandwiches."

FWLHPGURJ: Dem shits is delicious.

And then I started thinking about food, and poverty, and how much of what we now think of as classic comfort food came from a place of making do with what you have, and how "what we have" has changed from being things like beans and dandelion greens to being...white bread and Tang.

A lot of Southern Italian food comes from that place: cheap cuts of meat pounded thin and rolled with breadcrumbs and raisins; pasta with beans; mashed beans; last night's risotto rolled up into balls and deep fried; pizza that's punched rather than tossed because you can't afford to drop the dough on the floor.

When I was younger, my mother used to make me pastina and egg soup when I was sick. The ingredients of pastina and egg soup are as follows: pastina (called acini di pepe in a lot of brands), egg, water. This is it. This is all you need. You can use some olive oil if you like; you can put some cheese on top if you're not sick to your stomach.

A few years ago, my mother and I were talking, and I'd been sick recently, and had made myself some pastina and egg. "You know what's really good?" I told her eagerly. "I made it with chicken stock. Did you ever think of that?"

And my mother gave me a look that, if put into words, would've come out something like "Oh, you fancy, huh?" Because chicken stock is not the point of pastina and egg. Making it "better" is not the point of pastina and egg. The point of pastina and egg is that you make it with what you have, and in turn, it makes you feel better.

So in honor of the toast sandwich, and pastina and egg, and dem shits being delicious, I decided to make the ultimate make with what you have meal: Bread Soup.

There are a lot of different kinds of Bread Soup, with varying amounts of bread and different kinds of vegetables and varying degrees of fancy depending on what region they're from. I wanted to make the most basic of them all, Pane Cotto, the way they did in Campania: bread, water, some olive oil, some dried herbs. Period.

First you're going to need about half a pound of bread. This is literally the only item I actually bought for the pane cotto. Really, though, you shouldn't be buying bread for pane cotto. You should be using the bread that you have on hand that's going stale.

Buying bread, and then having to dry it out (say for 30 minutes in a 350 degree oven) is cheating. It's worse than cheating. It's a sign that you fancy now, huh?

But anyway, you have your already stale bread and you break it into chunks, or you have your fancy bread and you cube it up and dry it, and try not to let the sound of your grandparents turning in their graves because you're using good bread to make pane cotto bother you.

Next you put some oil in a pot. I was combining about three different recipes I found online, and ended up using about 8 tbsp of olive oil.
Hello, delicious fats. And then I threw some garlic and some crushed red pepper flakes into the oil, and let it heat up.

And then you're going to throw in your bread, and some water, and some salt and pepper and a couple of bay leaves, and whatever other dried herbs you have on hand.
You can, of course, use stock if you want to. Use any kind of stock you like -- chicken, beef, vegetable, mushroom, whatever you like. You can tell yourself that your great grandparents didn't come to this country so that you could eat soup made with bread and water, and that stock will be delicious.

And that's fine. Just know: you fancy, huh?

And you probably want to know how much water (or fancy stock) you should be adding to this, to which I can only reply (as my mother would) "Enough." You'll know. You want enough that it's going to break down the bread but not all get absorbed into the bread, leaving you with just a bunch of soggy bread chunks rather than anything recognizable as soup. You want enough.

Miiiii'! Alright, already. You want maybe 5 cups of water. And you're going to let all that simmer away together for maybe 10 minutes, maybe 15. You keep an eye on it until some of the bread is breaking up and making beautiful little clouds, but the rest of it is still together, and when the liquid looks like it's about right in proportion to the bread.

And then you dish it out. I cannot stress this enough, you want to divvy out as much of the bread as you can between your four bowls, and then divvy out the broth on top of that so that no one portion gets a giant bread sponge whilst another gets some water with garlic. And then you shred some parmesan cheese on top of it.

Dem shits? Is delicious.

There are things in this world that should taste good. Foie gras, for example. Given what the goose has to go through to produce it and what you've got to pay to get it on your plate, that shit had damn well better taste good. And it absolutely does.

But then there are things that absolutely should not taste good. Sandwiches made with bread and mashed potatoes. Soup made with bread and water. Offal. And yet so often, they do. So often, dem shits is, in fact, delicious.