Cucina povera and the cooking of the countryside

The cooking of the Italian countryside grew from the conditions of the peasant household, where the land, the season and the means of the family decided what reached the table. Elizabeth David, in Italian Food, treats this rural cooking as the foundation of the national cuisine, rooted in the separate regions and in the produce each of them could grow, raise or gather. The term cucina povera describes that tradition: the cooking of those who had little and made the most of it.

Elizabeth David's account in Italian Food presents Italian cooking as a cooking of regions and of the land, in which dishes depend on local produce and on the habits of the people who lived from it. Her insistence is on the ingredient and its place: the oil, the pulses, the bread, the vegetables and the modest cuts of meat that a country household could command. From such materials came soups, pasta, polenta and dishes of beans and greens, each shaped by what a district could supply rather than by any wish to display abundance. The character of cucina povera lies in economy and in skill. Bread that had hardened was not discarded but returned to the pot in soups and in dishes made with bread, and vegetables and wild greens gave bulk and flavour to the table. Pulses, grains and a little cured meat or cheese carried a household through the year, and the cook's judgement lay in making a few plain things taste of themselves. David admires this plainness and does not mistake it for lack of care; the simplicity of the result depends on good materials and exact handling. The tradition is also one of difference between regions. The olive oil of the south and centre, the butter and rice and maize of the north, and the pasta of one province against the polenta of another all belong to the same rural logic, though they yield very different tables. A cook who learns the countryside cooking of one region cannot assume that its methods hold in the next, and David's regional approach respects that limit. For the cook today the lesson of the countryside is one of restraint. The dishes ask for few ingredients, seasonal and well chosen, and for patient cooking rather than elaboration. Understood in this way, cucina povera is the basis on which the finer and more celebrated cooking of the Italian cities was built, and it remains the measure against which that cooking is judged.