Soup Season Ribollita: Spilled Milk #274

This Italian comfort food is the best meal in a bowl.

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I just got back from a trip to Italy, and it’s cold here in Minnesota. Soup season has arrived. I’m in the kitchen making a dish that is all about comfort, humble origins, sustenance (the real kind, not the food fetish hug kind) and deliciousness.

Ribollita is a traditional potage made of kale, sometimes cabbage, cannellini beans and bread. It’s a traditional Tuscan meal and an oft-quoted tangible symbol of cucina povera, that group of foods born of necessity. This rustic soup is the meal of the working class and those without work, and there are a lot of ways to make it. You want to add fennel? Do it. Hard squash? Summer squash? Be my guest. That being said, I know Italian cooks who feel it’s not ribollita without kale or Tuscan bread. And historically, they have a leg to stand on.

The origins of this soup date back to over a thousand year ago when the poorest of the poor would take stale oversized slices of bread, the kind the nobles had their roasts served on. This bread, flavored with the aroma and juices of the meat, would be cooked in water or broth along with the typical vegetables found in a farm community: carrots, beans and kale/cabbage. Like ALL foods in the poorest of homes long ago, pots were slung over fires, eaten from, and then food was left in them. Pots were kept on the fire, adding more water, bones and vegetables or taken off the fire to cool—and any potage of that type would be cooked and reheated several times because it was eaten over several days. The Italian word ribollita means “reboiled,” the name it still goes by.

In Italy, when it’s eaten as a leftover today, it’s often served with well sautéed onions added on the reboil with black pepper, lots of grated cheese and a healthy glug of extra virgin olive oil. I encourage you to try it that way, too. It’s a delicious second dose of this classic meal in a bowl.

And as you will see in this video, I do my fair share of reboiling even in this recipe, which is simple, but there are some tricks to making it great. Anyone can make this soup good with their eyes closed.

I want to teach you how to make it great.

Recipe: Soup Season Ribollita