25 Italian Ways to Feed a Whole Family on Almost Nothing

There were things a family with money never had to learn, and there were things the rest of us knew by the time we were seven years old, standing on a chair pulled up to a stove too tall for us. If there was money in the house, you cooked what the recipe called for, and you threw away what was left over. But if the money was tight, and in my mother's kitchen it was always tight, you learned a hundred small ways to put a whole family around a table on almost nothing at all, and to send every one of them away from it full. My name is Assunta, and these are the twenty-five kitchen tricks that only the poorer Italian families really knew, because they were the only ones who ever needed them, and there is no shame in a single one of them. No products to sell you, no jar to push, only the plain knowing that used to pass from a mother to a daughter and has quietly gotten lost. Some of you grew up with these. The smell of a sauce that had been simmering since morning, the heel of bread that never once made it to the bin, the one good pot that did the work of ten. We did not have much, but heaven knows our tables were fed, and there is a story in that I want to tell you by the time we reach the end. So stay with me, because number fourteen sounds almost mad, a whole soup built from nothing but the water the pasta had cooked in, and I will show you why it worked. And number one is not a trick at all. It is the real reason our tables were never empty even when the cupboard nearly was, and it might be the proudest thing I tell you all week. Give this a like if it brings back a memory for you, and tell me down in the comments which of these your own family already did, figlia mia. Right, let us get into it. Starting at number twenty-five.