Pappa al pomodoro is a dish that became famous with a song from the 60s taken from Gian Burrasca’s Giornalino, but maybe someone doesn’t knows it is a typical Tuscan recipe and which is the legend behind it.

🍅Pappa al pomodoro was born as a peasant dish of the eighteenth century, when tomatoes entered Tuscan cuisine permanently.

The legend of the dish that saved a convent

📜 A popular story tells that in a Tuscan convent besieged by hunger, thanks to stale bread, tomatoes and oil, the nuns managed to survive: they transformed these poor ingredients into a warm and nutritious food. Since then, Tuscan pappa al pomodoro has become a symbol of ingenuity and resistance.

Traditional Tuscan recipe for pappa al pomodoro

Main ingredients:

• 700–800 g ripe tomatoes or pulp/peeled tomatoes
• 300–350 g stale Tuscan bread (bland bread)
• 1 clove of garlic
• fresh basil
• extra virgin olive oil
• salt and pepper
• 1 liter of vegetable broth

1. Make the sauce

• Heat a drizzle of oil in a pan.
• Add the garlic (whole or sliced).
• Add the peeled and cut tomatoes, or the pulp/peeled tomatoes.
• Salt lightly and cook gently for 20–30 minutes.

2. Make the bread

• Cut stale bread into pieces
• Keep the broth warm.

3. Merge everything

• Pour some broth into the sauce.
• Add the bread and mix.
• Continue to cook over low heat, until the bread falls apart completely becoming a “gruel”.

4. Resting and creaming

• Let it sit 10–15 minutes with the lid on.
• Add more broth if needed, to adjust the consistency.
• Complete the dish with fresh basil and a generous drizzle of extra virgin olive oil.

🌟 Perfect consistency

Not a soup, not a polenta, but a creamy tomato-flavored porridge, dense, soft and enveloping.
In other words: delicious!