Free In Maremma by David Leavitt

same as the challenge of cooking it: how to make something out of next to nothing. In those years we witnessed the gentrification of some of the poorest Tuscan foods, with the result that soups such as panzanella and pappa al pomodoro and ribollita, once eaten only by farmers, fetched thirty dollars a bowl in New York restaurants. And acqua cotta —“cooked water”—is the poorest of them all.
    According to Mauro, at the heart of every acqua cotta was the phrase “se c’era... ” If there was a carrot, you’d put it in. If there was a little ricotta, you’d put it in. The basic ingredients were humble: onion, celery leaves, olive oil, and old unsalted Tuscan bread. (These are just about the only ingredients upon which recipes for acqua cotta agree.) To this soup, however, most cooks add a little tomato; perhaps sprinkle some grated pecorino cheese on the bread. Grander ingredients— bietola (Swiss chard), a few porcini mushrooms, or slices of sweet red peppers; basil, sage, parsley, garlic, peperoncino —are facoltativo (optional), as is using broth instead of water. Finally—but this is very rare; indeed, one might almost call it putting on airs—some cooks throw in a few pieces of sausage.

    Â 

    Mauro, the Ironmonger in Semproniano ( from Samprugnano 1900—1963: Storie e Figure )

    Despite occasional efforts at codification, acqua cotta remained, in our part of Tuscany, the subject of endless, if good-hearted, argument—much as in Amatrice people argued about whether a true Amatriciana was made with or without white wine, with bucatini or spaghetti. Thus while waiting in line at the butcher shop one morning, our request of the five women present for the “authentic” recipe for acqua cotta led to our being given five different “authentic” recipes. Sauro’s sister, the cook at the old-folks’ home in Semproniano, prepared a
bizarre version of this soup that, baked in a Teflon dish, resembled more than anything a Thanksgiving dressing. (In fact, you had to eat her acqua cotta with a fork, which was plain wrong.) The extremely refined version that Pina made at her restaurant showed fidelity to the spirit rather than the letter of the soup, for she omitted the most essential ingredients, onion and celery, in favor of a nest of spinach laid in the broth and topped with a poached quail egg. According to Pina, acqua cotta was eaten all over Central Italy. In her authoritative collection of regional Italian recipes, on the other hand, Anna Gosetti della Salda firmly identifies Grosseto as the birthplace of acqua cotta . Her recipe is essentially one for mushroom soup. Ada Boni’s version of acqua cotta —which she gives as one word, acquacotta —is essentially one for bell pepper soup.
    In the end, like its Emilian cousin, the famed ragú that in Bologna is served over tagliatelle, acqua cotta exists more as an ideal than a rigid recipe, as essential a piece of Maremman folklore as the butteri. And yet ... se c’era ... How far we’d come from Mauro’s poor childhood, from those days when there wasn’t enough flour, and pasta had to be made from ground chestnuts!

17
    D URING OUR FIRST months in Semproniano, we were often asked if we were German. This was an understandable mistake: most of the foreigners who settled in this part of Italy were German. In reply, we would explain that we were Americans, at which point, inevitably, we would be asked if we came from ... where? It sounded like airshay. The town in question was Hershey, Pennsylvania, to which vast numbers of Sempronianini (among other Maremmani) had emigrated. Alfred Pel-ligrini: “After visiting Pitigliano, the hometown of their grandparents, friends from Hershey ... commented, ‘the only difference between visiting the Italian section of the Hershey cemetery and visiting the cemetery in Pitigliano was that we couldn’t smell the aroma of