How to eat: leftovers soup

How to Eat (HTE) is wary of hailing any unintended benefits of lockdown. It feels glib. An insult to those suffering during this crisis and an insult to your intelligence. No one truly knows how Covid-19 will change our behaviour. It is still happening.

But if waste-minimal cooking was a growing in popularity before this pandemic, the financial trauma it is triggering will undoubtedly focus minds on cost-effective management of the food we buy. This is the age of Tom Hunt, modular meal-planning and, if possible, squirrelling away pennies saved.

Chucking perfectly good ingredients out seems crazy when so many of us may not have a job this time next year. Which is why How to Eat – the series looking at how best to enjoy Britain’s favourite foods – is this month looking at leftovers soup. To be specific, not just any old leftovers soup (if you have roast chicken remains you need to tackle or a glut of courgettes, please click away now), but the don, the king, the world-beater in this field: ribollita.

“My ultimate recipe for clearing the fridge,” as Anna Jones once wrote in these pages, is, agrees HTE, unrivalled in its elastic ability to incorporate excess produce and stray odds’n’ends from the depths of the veg drawer, and in ways which mean you can then string that soup out for days. Tuscans may be appalled at calling what follows “ribollita”. But what HTE’s ribollita remix lacks in authenticity (and cavolo nero), it makes up for in flavour and utility – this twisted spawn of ribollita!

The sell

What Nigel Slater dubbed “the very essence of kitchen economy” is an open framework of tinned tomatoes, pulses, garlic and onions, into which you can throw almost anything: browning fennel; wilting celery; limp, just-clinging-on carrots etc. For a few quid, you can create an enormous vat of joy (the base is two tins of chopped tomatoes, garlic, a litre of stock from cubes and two tins of cannellini beans, chickpeas or butter beans), which can then be magically reworked over subsequent nights. This is not just a soup that uses up leftovers. Any leftover ribollita is a boon in itself. Loosened each day with water, this ribollita could feed two for three days.

That need not get boring, either. Like Bowie in his pomp, ribollita is capable of endless reinvention. By garnishing it with fried chorizo or crispy bacon, augmenting its flavour with pesto or fresh chillies, adding loads of cabbage or a packet of “Mexican rice” so inauthentic it would leave Juárez baffled, you can take ribollita in multiple directions to varying degrees of radical effect. Would that intervention appal the editors of The Silver Spoon? Possibly. But the results are so tasty, don’t rule out talking them round. You could even whiz up the last spoonfuls to stretch it out as pasta sauce or a turbocharged passata to underpin a shepherd’s pie.

It would be daft to say the uses for ribollita are only as limited as your imagination. It has no role to play in making Irish stew. Or lemon meringue pie. But you get the idea. If there is a more modular main course, HTE would like to hear about it.

It is also ridiculously easy to make. Meaning “reboiled” in Italian, ribollita offers instant reward to even the clumsiest cook. Leaving it boiling vigorously because you got distracted by Twitter will only, ultimately, intensify its flavours. Forget it for a couple of nights in the fridge and that adds depth and character. It is robust, resilient, reliable.

Ribollita rejects

Tempting as it may be to deploy shrivelled mushrooms here, their slippery texture and earthy flavour jars. Peppers are, as HTE regulars know, an abomination against God in all hot foods. Courgette’s distinctive flavour is best experienced solo (it is not a team player), and spinach can be overwhelming if not used judiciously – particularly for those who suffer from the unpleasantly furry sensation of oxalate crystal buildup or “spinach teeth”.

Despite spuds being an original ribollita ingredient, the presence of potatoes in soup always turns that soup into a laboriously worthy mouthful. Bobbing in the depths, those chunks of potato seem to reach extraordinary, palate-stripping temperatures, too. Eating a potato-mined soup is akin to navigating a submarine through a heavily fortified enemy port.

Leaving the veg aisle, do not cook pasta or cured meats into your first batch of ribollita. Over days, the pasta will absorb moisture until it becomes limply gummy, while bacon and other meats become terribly mealy if left to sit in liquid for too long.

Garnish conundrums

It is one of the most persistent and egregious myths in food that every hot dish needs topping with a layer of chopped herbs (the offender here usually flat-leaf parsley). It makes no culinary sense. It adds nothing. In fact, it is a cold vegetal barrier to your enjoyment. Instead, try the cheffy trick of very lightly dusting such dense, tomato-based dishes with a little lemon zest to, like a smartphone camera filter, brighten the flavours.

Historically, chunks of stale bread were torn into ribollita, a curious habit that creates unpalatably spongy reefs of sodden bread in the soup. And who likes wet bread? The only thing worse is placing a thick slice of bread at the bottom of the bowl and pouring the soup over it, or resting one on top, which, a la French onion soup, leaves you trying to wrestle through a soggy bread crust with the blunt edge of a spoon. That is less soup, more practical joke.

At one time, HTE would have smothered its ribollita in a mountain of cheese. Mature cheddar, not parmesan, whose gritty refusal to melt properly is ideal in many pasta dishes but not here. However, increasingly, all that cheese feels like unnecessary gilding. The fat dampens ribollita’s vibrant flavours. It detracts rather than enhances. If you must have cheese (and HTE must), eat it later.

Sides

Ribollita is a chunky, bean-y soup. A filling semi-stew. You might argue there is no need to accompany it with bread. But HTE does not operate according to need. Its pursuit is pleasure. So loosen your skirt, undo your belt and embrace a large slice of entirely unnecessary bread on the side. It may leave you feeling uncomfortably stuffed, but life is short. No one ever lay on their deathbed regretting the fact they ate too much bread. Or should that be butter? HTE could wax lyrical about how high-quality, lightly toasted sourdough is optimal here – crisp without, soft within, torn in two through the thick crust to make it easily manoeuvrable. But a) in reality, as this column has always stressed, there is no such thing as objectively bad bread (it all satisfies a certain primeval desire with varying levels of competency), and b) here, the bread is many ways just a vehicle that enables you to move a thick screed of butter around your bowl.

Why would you want to do that? Because an outrageous alchemy occurs when butter meets the remnants of a tomato-based soup. It creates a rich and creamy, powerfully sweet and, if the base tomato sauce has been well seasoned (with soy, Worcestershire sauce, parmesan rinds), deeply savoury mouthful. It is an adult update on our memories of eating Heinz tomato soup with mountains of white sliced in 1985.

When

Whenever the weather or your mood takes an overcast turn. This is not a dish for sweltering days, and the meditative nature of making soup – the repetitive chopping, all that gently percolating hissing and popping – is a tonic for tired souls. Particularly if you add alcohol. To you. Not the soup.

Talking of which, ribollita is also good on slow, hungover days. Its simple, strong flavours will cut through even the heaviest fug and all that veg makes it feel wholesome, nutritious and restorative (peer-reviewed study pending), as you quietly vow to never again do shots on a Wednesday night/smoke/wake up in a bus shelter.

Equipment

Ribollita needs to be served in a bowl with the dimensions of an upturned Reni hat (a bucket hat to those outside the 0161 area). That receptacle needs to be deep and wide to convey a steaming sense of generosity. Eat it, but of course, with a deep, circular soup spoon. Eating soup with an oval dessert spoon on the basis that it looks more elegant is the ultimate Hyacinth Bucket move. Note: ribollita is a splasher. Does anyone still tuck a napkin into their collar? If not, keep a fresh T-shirt handy.

Drink

“What grows together, goes together” is a slice of old wine-pairing wisdom which any pedant could pick apart. But in this case, a glass of bright and enthusiastic chianti – earthy, fruity, refreshing acidity – is ideal. Its comparative thinness is a bonus. There is a lot going on in that soup; you don’t want huge complexity in your glass. Instead, chianti is a pleasant foil that adds to the party without dominating conversation. Longer drinks are a no-no. You want something to sip. You are already slurping down a bucket of 50% liquid. Guzzle a pint of iced water at the same time, and you will be tapping out, bloated and defeated, before you are halfway down the bowl.

So ribollita, AKA the ultimate leftovers soup: how do you eat yours?