Subscribe by RSS
Subscribe by Email
Pane e companatico: bread in Tuscany
When I was a kid, it was still very common to hear people talk of ‘pane e companatico’, meaning essentially ‘bread and whatever goes with it’.
Photo by foéÖþoooey
This is a linguistic trace of the central role played by bread in the Italian culinary tradition, especially when ‘companatico’ was scarce and more expensive than most people could afford. Bread is so important in our dietary tradition that we have national laws explicitly meant to define the different types and the products which can go in its preparation.
Italians apparently eat 66kg of bread per person every year. My grandparents ate bread with anything: pasta, vegetables and even fruit. I remember being served bread and figs and bread and wine with sugar during festive family meals. And every time I go to my parents’ place in the countryside, I cannot but remember my grandfather sitting on a half-broken wooden bench, slicing a stale loaf of bread with his pocket knife and eating it with ripe grapes or peaches.
Gloria
A "born and bred Tuscan". My whole family comes from a small village called Civitella Marittima, halfway between Siena and the coast of the Maremma, and to me this is more than just the place I come from, it’s essentially who I am: the way I talk, my habits, tastes, and knowledge depend on the fact that I was born and grew up there. I run a holiday home here - Casina di Rosa.
