The art to make shift (poverty, creativity and food)

In the old times when poverty was more spread in the countries nowadays known as developed, when fridges and freezers were even over sci-fiction, and take-away were yet to come for many and many years, cooks, chefs and ordinary people had to be clever and practical. Few of them could afford to waste food and not to use the leftovers at all. So perhaps the greater gift that an housekeeper could have, in order not to waste food and therefore money, was to create dishes with what was left in the larder, or from the day before. And especially with the leftovers they had to be ingenious for not being boring.
There were no books at that time or TV programs, everything was made from scratch from what was available, and sometimes was so simple than it might look even naïve.
Italy is a land where people are really devoted to their traditions and roots, and everybody, whatever region they come from, will always extol the quality of their own land and that the food and the wine from their region is the best in Italy. People from Tuscany don’t have a clue what’s typical in Piedmont or which wine is from where, and this is a rule effective all over Italy. Well of course we know what’s going on in the rest of Italy but we don’t really care about it. Perhaps because every single region as such a plenitude of products, cheeses, wines and oil than we wouldn’t need to look further, but we do.
But let’s do a step back. We were talking about the art to make shift especially in my city: Livorno. Here housewives were really creative both in the dish and in the name given to them; the recipes now known as part of the peasant or poor cuisine are plenty, and all of them had as main aim to fill up the stomach as much as possible. We can start with the heroic minestra sui discorsi; the translation it’d come something like speeches soup. Referring to the speech and than something not real, underline the poverty of this dish; in fact when the stock cube didn’t exist and there were no money to buy any kind of meat whatsoever the housewives put water and salt in a pot and then add both dry and fresh herbs, and a beef bone if the butcher was so generous to present one. Once the “soup” was eventually ready they’d cook pasta in it. Not really appetizing but you know what can’t be cured must be endured (If you were “rich” you could add also pig rind). Another one has as basic ingredient what in Italy is called lesso (boiled beef), which is the beef the stock was made of. When the stock was done, no way that this meat was thrown away, the recipe to reuse it are hundreds all over Italy, and in Livorno would possibly ends up for the making of the francesina (little French), so for 4 people they’d brown 500gr of white onion in 1dl of olive oil, then add the meat thinly cut and at the end 50gr of tomato puree dissolved in a little water. Seasoned and cooked for about an hour.Still with the lesso left from the day before there is the Inno di Garibaldi; what Garibaldi has to do with it? The heavy use of tomatoes and tomato puree results in a dish with a powerful red colour that reminds of the uniform of the soldiers loyal to the hero of the two worlds, Garibaldi in fact. So for 4 person you need to brown four cloves of garlic and two twigs of rosemary in one dl of olive oil, then add 4 big ripe tomatoes (or 50gr of tomato puree) with tree tbsp of water and at the end 500gr of potatoes cut into big chunks; when the potatoes are almost ready add the lesso in chunk as well. Add a little more water and the “red” dish is ready. There would be another one but research says that is more an anecdote than a real fact; I’ll propose you anyway, it’s called brodo con i sassi (stock with rocks). So this is the story: hundreds years ago when poverty and hunger where widely spread in Italy (we’re talking about a period between half 1700 and the end of 1800, a period of foreigner occupation and fights for the unification eventually obtained in 1861), housewives in Livorno were used to go by the quay in the clean waters of that time and gathering rocks from the bottom of the sea, in particular the one with all the seaweed stuck on. Those rocks they were not supposed to come in contact with the air, so they were put in a big bucket with sea water in; once back they eventually boiled the water with rocks and herbs inside, and cook in some pasta.
And then we had fishes, especially the ones consider as the rabble of the ichthyology such as picarels, brogues, grey mullets, scorpion fish, the not really fancied fishes, or even worst the one partially bitted by water-fleas therefore not sellable. So people created the fish stew famous all over italy and know as Cacciucco all livornese (alla livornese is translated in some book as livornaise), and as often happen on this days, what used to be addressed to common and low classes people, is now became something for which you must own a quite fat wallet consider the cost of the first matter. Fishes was and still is a kind of good that perish faster than any other good, whether is meat or vegetable. So people use to keep fish mix with salt to keep it for long time, baccalà or bacalao in Spanish is nothing more than cod. Is actually salt cod, and in the past centuries cod had to survive all the way from the North Sea down to the Mediterranean, so if wasn’t dried on the air as the Viking us to do (in this case is no more baccalà but stoccafisso) you had to keep in salt. From here was born the way to marinate small fishes and vegetables known as scapece.
In Livorno we called this marinate sotto il pesto and are famous the picarel scapece or as we say Zerri sotto il pesto.

PICAREL MARINATED (picarel scapece)

Ingredients (makes 4):
800gr of picarel
8 garlic cloves
3 small chilli pepper
flour for dusting
1l white vinegar
3dl extravirgin olive oil
salt
10gr black peppercorn

Method:
Open the fishes and take off the interior. Wash and dry them. Dust them with flour and fry in a frypan. Once fried lay down the fishes in a tray sprinkle over the garlic and chilli pepper finely chopped. Add the peppercorns and vinegar. Allow to rest for 12 hours and taste as starter.