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The Subtle & Pleasant Power of Peasant Food
When it’s cold outside, or I’m missing someone, or when I have that overwhelming urge to cook something that has history nestled within itself — you can bet that I won’t be making a damn salad.
I also won’t whip up homemade Hollandaise or make anything with truffle oil. Pate won’t be on the menu and neither will anything fancy-schmancy.
Instead, I reach for my 70-year-old roaster, or the ancient cast-iron frying pan or the old dented soup pot I bought at a garage sale 20 years ago. My husband has threatened to toss it out but I tell him it has magic in it.
What counts as peasant food?
Well, my peasanty background is full of Brit, Scot, Irish and Czech ancestors who knew their way around a stove. They didn’t have a lot of money but they usually had a garden and also they believed in eating head to tail. For you — it will be something different.
But my peasant food leans toward slow-cooked food like roast chicken, beef or pork; stew, cabbage rolls, casserole, shanks, chili, sausages, and sauerkraut, homemade bread, soup, cabbage, onions, mashed potatoes, rice pudding, and brownies, pie or fruit crisps.
There will unapologetically be carbs. There will be butter. There will often be tough cuts of meat. Most certainly there will be vegetables that have some dirt left on them.
But there will not be a meal in 30 minutes or less. Good peasant food takes time to reveal itself. But you will make enough so that you can eat today, tomorrow and later in the week too.
Peasant food can take 5–7 days in the fridge without a whimper or whisper of spoiling. It has a backbone after all.
Peasant food is alchemy. Slow heat, simple ingredients and time wrap around each other and become something new, old and delicious at the same time.
You don’t require fancy ingredients. In fact, if you have just the basic supplies in your home then fragrant and tasty peasant food is only a few hours away.
“Oddly, it is not real cooks who insist that the finest ingredients are necessary to produce a delicious something…Real cooks take stale bread and aging onions and make you happy.” — Susan Wiegand, Cooking as Courtship
Peasant food always has some magical transformational power in it. It is humble food that adapts with the needs and supplies of the cook.
The Italians call it Cucina Povera and there’s a wonderful book of the same name by Pamela Sheldon Johns. I drag her book out often and cook some humble dishes and dream of the others.
The Italians make peasant food like ribollita — a classic Tuscan vegetable-bread soup. It starts its life “as a sturdy vegetable soup which is then transformed into a second dish by layering leftover soup with bread, then into a third dish by baking the leftover soup and bread. The fourth and final transformation is ribollita, the remaining vegetable stew cooked in a skillet” like a small patty.
I would happily eat every version of that.
Because peasant food is also about the delicious extension of things.
In our home, stale bread becomes croutons or breadcrumbs. Or it is layered in a pan and soaked with an eggy custard, raisins, and cinnamon and baked into a bread pudding that makes people close their eyes and smile.
The leftover au jus from a roast chicken or roasted meat or stew is also used to make a soup broth. Or sometimes turned into gravy depending on the mood of the au jus and me.
If I feel like it — I’ll call someone and say, “Would you like to come for Farm Food tonight?” and unless the green aliens have landed — I know they will say yes. And if they can’t make it — that is OK too.
Because peasant food is like that. You can eat it today as you curl up by the fire with a good book or you can eat it tomorrow with a rag-taggle of friends and family at the table.
Peasant food has a generous spirit that way.
In case you would feel disappointed and left to look for a peasanty recipe all by your lonesome (as my mom would say), here’s something you should try.
It comes from the battered, metal-coiled 1976 cookbook that was published by the women who lived in the little farm community I grew up in. The book is always close by in my kitchen.
This is my grandmother’s recipe. It isn’t fancy. You’ll clean out some bits and bobs of your fridge and pantry. You use a can of mushroom or celery soup because even peasants aka farm wives in the 1970s needed a shortcut every now and then. I know she certainly did.
Imagine having cattle, pigs, geese, chickens, a garden; baking bread, cookies and pies, canning, driving a grain truck during harvest, laundry and more — and still finding time to create 3 homemade meals a day? This recipe was her version of fast food. And it is damn good.
I like making her casserole in one of my old round roasters. Use a Dutch oven if you’re fresh out of ancient, 70-year-old bakeware.
Farmer’s Food Casserole:
In a casserole pan, slice raw, peeled potatoes alternately with sliced onion, salt, and pepper. (I add in frozen peas and 2 carrots and 2 celery sticks sliced thinly as well). Cover with lightly browned hamburger meat. (A 1-pound package will do.)
Pour 1 tin mushroom soup thinned with some milk, (stir it in a bowl first) and pour over meat. Cook with the lid on in a 350-degree oven until done, about 1 hour.
Best eaten with a thick slice of bread — homemade if you’ve been adventurous.
Thanks for reading! I have loads of food essays (delicious recipes too) and thoughtful and quirky simpler living essays waiting for you. (Well over 100 of them!) And this story caught the attention of NBC News in New York!
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