Bread Soup
(Panata) This excellent and nutritious soup is a godsend for using the stale bread that must never again be thrown away. It is composed of bread crumbs and grated bread, eggs, grated cheese, nutmeg (in very small quantity) and salt, all mixed together and put in broth previously prepared, which must be warm at the moment of the immersion, but not at the boiling point. Then place it on a low fire and stir gently. Any vegetable left over may be added. 4
A recipe in the older style: it names the components and the method but leaves the proportions to the cook. What follows fills in the working quantities and flags the one step that decides whether it succeeds.
- The hinge: broth below a simmerThe eggs are what bind this soup, and they set at around 160-180F. Add the bread-and-egg mixture to broth that is warm but well off the boil, then hold the pan over low heat, stirring, until it thickens to a loose porridge. Boiling broth turns it into shreds of scrambled egg in thin stock.
- Workable proportionsFor 1 quart of broth, use about 1 cup fine dry breadcrumbs, 2 eggs, 1/2 cup grated Parmigiano or Grana, a few grates of nutmeg and salt to taste. Beat the eggs, cheese and crumbs to a thick paste first so the mixture disperses rather than clumping.
- "Bread crumbs and grated bread"The two phrases may simply be doubling the same idea: stale bread reduced on a grater or in a mortar, rather than the soft interior torn into pieces or commercial seasoned crumbs. A dry, close-crumbed loaf works best; sliced sandwich bread goes gluey.
- The broth"Broth previously prepared" means a real meat or chicken brodo, lightly salted, since the cheese brings its own salt. Boxed stock works but reduce added salt further and taste before serving.
- NutmegThe warning about quantity is worth keeping. Grate it fresh and stop at two or three passes for a quart; pre-ground nutmeg in any quantity flattens the dish.
- Leftover vegetablesAdd them already cooked and cut small, and add them to the broth before the egg mixture goes in, so the soup needs no further heating once the eggs are in.
- Yield and servingThe trailing "4" may be a serving count, though in books of this kind a bare trailing numeral is often a recipe number; the quantities above give four modest bowls. Serve at once with extra grated cheese, as it stiffens noticeably on standing and does not reheat well.
Panata belongs to the wide European family of bread soups — French panade, Spanish sopa de pan — all built on the same premise that dried bread is a food and not a waste product. In Italian domestic cooking it sits alongside pancotto and stracciatella: the first cooks bread to a pulp in water or broth, the second stirs egg and cheese into hot broth, and panata does both at once. A closely similar panata appears in Pellegrino Artusi's La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (first published 1891), which likewise directs that the broth be warm but not boiling. The framing here — bread "that must never again be thrown away" — reads as a sign of a period in which kitchen thrift was a matter of public instruction as well as private habit.