Pappa al Pomodoro

This Tuscan bread soups spins stale bread into gold

This is just on my kitchen table with natural light. Not a studio with a backdrop!

All great cuisines remain close to their peasant roots. Nothing fosters culinary innovation more than hunger, and striving to never waste food remains a central engine for inspiration in the kitchen. When I teach, I always ask people to raise their hands if one of the best things they ever cooked was on the last day of a vacation, when they needed to use up the last of the groceries they bought for the rental house, and so they created a meal with what they had in front of them. Some hands always go up.

The reason those meals are often so memorable is that people bring their full attention and creativity to bear on their dinner. Limitations inspire. This is a desirable mindset, and one we should all endeavor to cultivate when we cook. And what we make doesn’t have to be a new invention; sometimes all we need to do is toss off a banger that some hungry serfs whipped up hundreds of years ago because stale bread and tomatoes were all they had, and it turned out to be awesome so it entered the canon.