Lessons from cucina povera
On osso buco, cooking with care and creativity.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro. I hope you’re hungry!
One of my earliest food memories doesn’t involve me eating at all – only the unrivalled joy of watching two plump middle-aged men cook and taste their way around Italy on the BBC series Two Greedy Italians.
In our home, Antonio Carluccio recipes are bible, but onscreen, Gennaro Contaldo is my favourite. The way he exclaims “look how beautiful!” as he unwraps the meat, “oh my gosh, oh my my, that is so good, yeah!” as he scrapes the caramelised bits from the bottom of the pan, stirring them into his soffrito. His enthusiasm is infectious, as is the way he handles his ingredients in a manner simultaneously utilitarian and reverential: “good salt” sprinkled liberally on meat ribboned with fat, “stock is important” he tells the camera solemnly as he pours golden liquid into a steaming pan.
The video I am describing is actually of Gennaro on Jamie Oliver’s channel (he’s the one who taught Jamie to cook Italian food). And the dish he’s cooking? Osso buco, my plan for dinner on a stormy Wednesday night.
If you’ve never had osso buco, do. As Gennaro explains, it is a classic cucina povera dish, a rustic way of cooking developed by Italian peasants to create maximum flavour despite a paucity of ingredients. Traditionally made of bone-in veal shin, osso buco is braised low and slow with onions, white wine and stock – the other ingredients and details vary from region to region, chef to chef. Gennaro’s recipe is a Tuscan one, and so he adds carrots to his soffritto as well as tomato passata. For mine, I added a rib of celery and used rosé in lieu of white – sacrilege to some, but in the spirit of cucina povera, given I had a bottle already open.
While osso buco is no longer the cheap cut it once was (due to the worldwide popularity of what was once a meal eaten only by the rural poor), cooking it did remind me of this underlying philosophy of cucina povera: use what you have, cook it with love and care, and turn what might otherwise be wasted into an opportunity for flavour. At its heart is creativity and the understanding that eating well has any number of definitions. In this seemingly unending cost of living crisis, we can glean a lot from cucina povera – below are some of the lessons I’ve learned.
Value the ingredients you have, plan thoughtfully, cook carefully.
Don’t demonise carbs. Pasta started out as a cucina povera food, mainly in the south where it was made without eggs, simply flour and water. Stale bread was never wasted, turned into dishes like panzanella while breadcrumbs used to stuff vegetables or coat foods for frying. Polenta, rice and potatoes (including gnocchi) were also staples of peasant cooking, used to stretch meals further.
Embrace pulses! Tinned beans and lentils are excellent in a pinch, but dried lentils are extremely economical, nutritious and delicious. Italians love thick, bean-based soups and each region has its own version of pasta e fagioli (pasta with beans). Add pulses to any soup to boost the portion and the protein.
Buy cheaper cuts of meat (including nutrient-packed offal) and cook long and slow with bases of sautéed herbs or tomatoes and black olives.
Preserve! Back in the day this looked like drying, salting and curing meat and fish so it would last longer – think capocollo (that’s gabagool to the Sopranos-heads), mostardella (made from leftover pork and beef combined with aromatics), but also baccala’ (salt cod) or stoccafisso (air-dried cod). For us, this might look like buying in bulk when ingredients are cheap and freezing, or making pickles or ferments with fruit and vegetables you might otherwise not use up.
… and if you do make osso buco, don’t forget to scoop the buttery marrow from its bone – it’s the best bit.
Farro puts the deli in delicious
The Farro deli cabinet is an Auckland institution, and another roll out of seasonal, mouth-watering salads, snacks, and sammies has just landed. It's got salmon soba noodle salad, roast butternut and stracciatella sammies, a kimchi spiked cheese toastie, plus speedy snacks like lamb kofta and sweet smoky chicken nibbles.
Head to one of their seven Tāmaki Makaurau stores to load up on a lush lunch!
Weekly bites
Speaking of creativity: a community restaurant in Dunedin is thriving on a business model based on compassion. The Bowling Club makes around 1000 meals a day, with 800 or 900 served in the restaurant, which was conceived as a place for people to gather and feel welcome, while the rest are parcelled up and delivered for free to people in need. Meals cost just $4, and many choose to pay it forward by paying for an extra meal to go to someone who needs it or making a delivery on their way home.
Having followed the antics of chef and bestselling cookbook author Molly Baz for a while now, I was tickled when the pregnant chef launched a recipe for lactation cookies, posting pictures of herself in an open shirt, pregnant belly poking out, holding said cookies over her breasts. Cute! I thought as I scrolled by, but apparently, not everyone felt this way. When the image was used to advertise Baz’s cookies on a billboard in Times Square, the ad was pulled for allegedly violating “guidelines on acceptable content”, sparking an online debate around the history of censoring breastfeeding. The cookies, meanwhile, sound delicious, although a Google search for molly+baz+cookies still directs you to her viral Pistachio Brown Butter & Halva Chocolate Chip Cookies.
Ever wondered what astronauts eat? I always assumed it was mostly soylent, but as it turns out, people who are capable of sending humans into space are also pretty good at figuring out what we’ll eat when we get there. In 2021, Nasa launched the Deep Space Food Challenge with a goal of developing novel food production technologies requiring minimal resources and producing minimal waste. As this BBC article reports, among the companies to reach the final phase of Nasa’s challenge is a Finnish company using space waste to create protein, while three of the finalists are working on ideas around funghi – ideas that can also be utilised on Earth to create nutritious food with a very low footprint.
Introducing The Spinoff Welly 500
Over 300 people have already joined our new community of supporters, and we are grateful for your tautoko of our Wellington coverage.Last August, The Spinoff hired Joel MacManus as its first-ever Wellington editor. Wellingtonians have always supported us, and Joel coming on board has meant we’ve been able to start returning the favour with a dedicated focus.
The Spinoff is looking for 129 more people to to donate $50 or more and join The Spinoff Welly 500. Find out more or join today.
Snack of the week
Tao Kae Noi Tempura Chicken Larb 40g (I bought mine from Jadan Supermarket but lost the receipt – they are $5.99 at Ken’s Mart)
I’m not sure what I expected from these, but when I pulled the first crispy square of seaweed from the packet I realised this was not it. I think I expected something thinner? Closer to the delicious oily sheets of seasoned nori I’ve had to stop buying because I cannot live with how much plastic is used to encase just five delicate wafers of seaweed. These are not those. These are substantial crackers, similar in size and texture to Grain Waves, but way tastier.
Do they taste like chicken larb? No, but only because much of the experience of eating chicken larb comes from the contrasting sizes and textures, nubby pearls of spicy mince, the crunch of shallot, the softness of chopped herbs. These taste like chicken flavoured chips with added spice, but that’s not a bad thing at all – I love a chicken chip. They are a slightly elevated version, though, with a slight sweetness to them as well as the briny complexity of seaweed that sticks to your molars.
While 40g is a small size packet, they do pack a bigger flavour punch than a standard potato chip (or Grain Wave), so it does feel like decent bang for your buck. Would be delicious with a cold lager, but were quite good with a little glass of rosé. 8/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
