Once upon a time, inmates weren't intended for well-prepared dishes, yet this prisoner's soup won us over at the first taste. Because it's good, healthy and tasty and invites us to use less valuable pieces of meat creatively, recovering some of the common sense that inhabited ancient kitchens, capable of seeing the star ingredient of a new recipe in a scrap.
The story of the prisoner's soup
This soup was born in Pistoia where the city prison was surrounded by slaughterhouses. The easy availability of meat scraps and the low price requested for the parts used in the recipe (mainly calf giblets) stimulated the creativity of the prison cooks who created a fantastic soup still very popular in the city, based on soft parts of the veal, stale bread, cheese and pepper.
The prisoner's soup recipe
Ingredients for 6 people
300 g offal of beef, 300 g of stale bread, 1 onion, 1 carrot, 1 stick of celery, grated Tuscan pecorino, extra virgin olive oil, salt, pepper.
Method
The day before preparation: carefully wash the entrails of the beef under running water. Cook in unsalted boiling water for about 10 minutes, drain and remove the cooking water. Let them cool, put them (in the refrigerator if it is hot at home) in a bowl with clean water until the next day.
Preparation: season the carrot, celery and onion cut into cubes and seasoned in a drizzle of extra virgin olive oil. Then add the entrails without the preservation liquid, add the water and cook for at least 3 hours over very low heat. At this point, remove the entrails from the pot and set them aside.
Now take a pan (traditionally the earthenware ones were used), arrange the stale bread cut into slices and sprinkle them with the hot broth after filtering it.
Add salt, pepper and cook for 40 minutes, stirring until the bread has flaked. Pour this soup into single-serving bowls or deep plates, add the beef entrails and sprinkle with grated pecorino toscano.
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