Eco audit: cucina povera or using things up

I like leftovers.  I particularly like leftovers when other people come over and bring food with them.  Unplanned leftovers – and the planning then of what to do with them – is a treat for the food mind as well as the body.

I’m trying to remember what leftovers were like when I was growing up.  I think there weren’t a lot of them…we liked our food! I do remember the joy of the cold leftover sausage (and indeed of leftover baked beans, though I appreciate this is a specialist interest).

I also remember the pre-empting of leftovers: the mopping of plates with bread, particularly after something like mince and potatoes, when there was still gravy for the soaking.  My parents were fans of using the heel of a loaf for this (ie the end bit), so clearly not everyone could have a heel at the same time, but there is something particularly good about using a thick piece of bread for this.

I do also remember occasions of making jam tarts, and being allowed to make things with the pastry trimmings.  Begging to eat the apple peelings from Bramleys apples (yes, I know they’re sour, but so are many great tastes), if mum was cooking apples for something else like crumble.

Food habits can be formed by daily life – how soon we need to get food on the table after we get home; whether cooking is a pleasure or when we just need to Fuel Up Fast.  But they are also informed by what we read about food, what we eat, and what we absorb from all this about how to use food in the first place.

Part of my starting the year was looking at the kitchen cupboards: what was out of date? And then (feeling a little guilty for some of the spices and so on that were well out of date), looking to see what was still in date, or just about.

What could be used up? Some of it was things I had in small quantities, and just needed one dish to go; some were ingredients that I use less, now the gluten- and dairy-free cooking has taken over more.

In the Pippi Longstocking stories, Pippi decides to be a Turn Up Stuffer: someone who just finds interesting things along the way.  I love the description of reaching into the hollow tree and bringing out all kinds of things that must have been planted there already, but seem magical to her friends Tommy and Annika.

I decided to become something like a Use Up Stuffer – but I suspect that kind of title might cause a few problems online, if I used it regularly.  So I’ll casually share it here in the text, and then you’ll know what I’m talking about if I mention it again.

In my literary food education, using things up, turning variations on a theme, has been praised.  It’s part of traditional Scots cooking, with that heavy emphasis on multiple uses for oats.

It’s part of Italian cooking, where no little bit of bread goes to waste; no leftover clump of pasta is abandoned.  And it’s part of Polish cooking, with dishes like pierogi (dumplings), where fillings can be as varied as you like, depending on what you have available.

Back to my teenage environmentalist.  I already knew about being able to buy food in and out of season.  But what I suspect I would  not have been familiar with is the social pressure to buy a big range of food – to have the full fruit bowl for example – whether or not we eat it.

There’s been a lot of effort to raise public awareness of not wasting food, including advice on how to use up leftovers.  If you get hooked in this area, there’s a great book I found, which draws on lots of different food cultures in how it uses things up.

Again, we come full circle.  Wartime Britain got very adept at making dishes out of all kinds of things – and making up for what it didn’t have.  We move through a growing time of plenty, aided by importing food by plane.

And we come through to a time where we have to be educated about not wasting food – while there are still food shortages, and malnutrition, in many places around the world.  And many in-between places where nothing is wasted, still.

I’m realising that my soap box might be coming into view, so I’ll stop.  My point in starting this series was to check myself first.  And I can report that the using up stuff project is going OK – including discovering a few new recipes along the way.  Always a pleasure.  (I discover also that I am not alone in setting myself a store cupboard challenge.)

I’ll admit, I’m some way from the ‘use everything including the entrails’ school of culinary thought.  Not that form of cucina povera (or ‘food of the poor’), though I’ll happily make a stock from chicken bones.

But things like stock, breadcrumbs, a spare carrot – those are like paints in the box.  You know you’ll have a picture out of them – and hopefully a feast for the eyes, as well as a the stomach, at the end of it.