The classic Florentine winter soup, ribollita, literally means ‘reboiled’, which not only implies the use of leftovers but also refers to one of the essential techniques in getting this soup just right. Using stale bread, seasonal vegetables and reliable beans, this is a cheap and nourishing dish.
A key ingredient for this recipe is cavolo nero, a durable, dark green, almost bluish cabbage with long, slender bumpy leaves. At a certain point in winter, cavolo nero seems to be the only thing that you can find in the markets. Florentines use it in many winter dishes: in soups, as a topping for crostini or as a side dish to serve with meat.
Also key is the stale bread, it is what lends the soup its characteristic thickness. Ribollita, along with pappa al pomodoro and panzanella, is one of the favourite ways to use up stale Tuscan bread – indeed, it’s a reason to buy the bread fresh and let it go stale. If you don’t have proper, unsalted Tuscan bread handy, use a good Italian loaf, preferably springy and white, with a dark, hard crust.
Artusi’s recipe for ribollita is, more than one hundred years later, still one of the best ways to make it and every Tuscan household probably does some slight variation on this. This is mine. The way my in-laws (like many Tuscans) like to serve this is with a quarter of a fresh red onion – dip it into the soup and take crunchy bites of onion and soup together. It’s not for the faint hearted or those who don’t like onion breath but it is certainly an authentic way to eat ribollita.