What is cucina povera?

The phrase gets used a lot on menus and in cookbooks, often with a soft-focus nostalgia. It is worth knowing what it actually points to, because the idea behind it is one of the most useful things a home cook can borrow.

What the term means

Cucina povera translates as "poor cooking" or "peasant cooking". As Pia Bertucci of the University of South Carolina's Italian programme notes in a conference abstract on the subject, it has become a popular term in contemporary Italian food writing, one that recalls times of scarcity and celebrates simple dishes built from a handful of basic ingredients.

In practice it describes the food of people who had little money and could not afford to waste anything: the cooking of farm households and rural villages, built on what the land, the season and the larder gave them.

The principles

You can boil it down to a few habits:

• Use what is around. Local, seasonal vegetables, legumes, grains, bread, wild greens and herbs.
• Waste nothing. Stale bread, cheese rinds, vegetable trimmings and leftovers all become the base of another dish.
• Make a little go a long way. A small amount of something rich, a piece of cheese, a spoonful of good oil, a cured ingredient, flavours a whole pot.
• Let time do the work. Slow simmering and soaking turn humble ingredients into something deep.

What it is not

It is not deliberately austere, and it is not a diet. The goal was always good food, and many of these dishes are generous and comforting. It is also not a single national cuisine. Like Italian cooking in general, it varies enormously from region to region and town to town, shaped by local produce.

It is also worth a little humility. The rustic, sun-dappled image is a modern view of what was, for many families, real hardship. We can admire the ingenuity without pretending the scarcity was charming.

Dishes from the tradition

Many famous dishes grew out of this way of cooking, especially those built on bread, beans and vegetables. Tuscany gives some of the clearest examples. The regional tourism board, Visit Tuscany, describes:

• Ribollita: a winter soup of stale bread, cannellini beans and black cabbage with vegetables, whose name refers to being boiled more than once.
• Pappa al pomodoro: a summer soup of tomatoes, bread, garlic, olive oil and basil, made with stale, saltless Tuscan bread.
• Panzanella: a summer salad of stale bread, ripe tomatoes, onion and basil.

Across Italy you will find the same logic in pasta and beans, in polenta, in soups thickened with bread, and in pasta dressed with little more than garlic, oil and chilli. For the bread dishes in particular, see what to do with stale bread.

Why it still matters

Cucina povera is a good teacher for a modern kitchen. It encourages cooking with what you have, buying in season, and treating leftovers as ingredients rather than obligations. It also shows how much flavour comes from technique and patience rather than expensive shopping. A pot of beans with a soffritto, a good oil and a piece of parmesan rind is not a compromise. It is the whole point.