A Year in a Tuscan Cooking School: August

It’s still summer. Tomatoes, peppers, blackberries, and seven (plus one) recipes to fall in love with

Welcome to the eighth chapter of A year in a Tuscan Cooking School. Each month, I open the doors of my cooking school to share a more intimate glimpse into daily life in Tuscany: its flavours, its people, and the gentle rhythm of the seasons. It’s a slow journey, like leafing through the pages of a favourite cookbook.

If you’re new to the series, you can revisit the previous chapters here: January, February, March, April, May, June and July.

This is our last letter before a two week break in Puglia. I’ll read you again on September, 17th.

This is also when we’ll be launching the new 2026 season, including the full calendar of our upcoming Masterclasses. As a subscriber to this newsletter, you’ll be the first to receive all the details, with early access to bookings before they open to the public.

And now, a little sneak peek!

We’re cooking up something truly special for March: a four-day Masterclass from Tuesday 3rd to Friday 6th, featuring two incredible guest teachers from different corners of Italy. Together, we’ll explore the flavours of not one, but three Italian regions, a deep dive into local traditions, ingredients, and techniques. Can you guess which regions our guest teachers are from?

We’ll cook side by side in the kitchen, visit the local market, visit a working farm, taste extra virgin olive oil and wine, and even head out to forage for wild herbs with an expert guide.

More details coming very soon, but our paid subscribers will be the first to discover all the details and secure their places before anyone else.

The view from my walk in Casole d’Elsa.

AUGUST

I’m wrapping up this letter while a cake is baking in the oven, a scent that always smells like home. It’s our new oven, very basic but full of promise, that we just bought for our home kitchen. If a recipe works here, it’s definitely going to work in your oven. Call it quality control!

I’m making a banana bread¹ I’ve been baking for more than a decade, a recipe from Molly Wizenberg’s beautiful debut cookbook, A Homemade Life, which I’ve tweaked to be dairy-free (coconut oil instead of butter, and soy yoghurt to replace the regular one, plus a heaping tablespoon of cocoa powder to convince Livia to try it. Spoiler: she loved it!). Next up is my apple olive oil cake — a classic in our family and Livia’s absolute favourite — to celebrate her fifth birthday on Thursday.

Meanwhile, I’m rummaging through the pantry to plan our last few meals before we head off on a two-week holiday to visit Tommaso’s family in Salento, Puglia.

But August is also the month when we begin to prepare for winter.

It’s not just tomato preserves and plum jam, but also collecting honesty seeds during my walks, dreaming of a cottage-style garden for next year, and stacking up a truckload of firewood for the colder months ahead. I love these activities: they ground me in the here and now, but give me also the chance to feel a bit more prepared for what is about to come.

My daily walks changed a bit this month, too. Our usual country road was overrun with horseflies, so I had to find some new routes. I ended up in Casole d’Elsa, our neighbouring town — just a short drive from here — a charming medieval village where Livia goes to school. I walked along its ancient walls and through quiet back alleys in the early mornings, when the air was still humid but refreshingly cool.

We also escaped for two long weekends to Bivigliano, my father-in-law’s hometown, just thirty minutes north of Florence but nestled in a cooler area at the gates of Mugello. There, I started every day with a walk up to the Montesenario abbey, a peaceful climb I’ve come to love.

I’m taking these daily walks seriously, and I can’t wait to trade hills for the promenade in Porto Cesareo, with the sea just a few steps away.

August and summer cooking classes

August in this neck of the woods is usually far too hot and humid, and most of the vendors at the market are away on holiday, so we decided to slow things down and significantly pare down the cooking classes, ready for the big resurgence of the season in September.

We ran just two classes and welcomed a total of fourteen lovely students from Australia, Germany, the US, and the UK.

Together, we cooked potato gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce and toasted walnuts, and rye pici with a herby courgette sauce. We also prepared two pots of my favourite tomato sauce — sweet, velvety, and made with slow-cooked onions. There was enough leftover that I poured it into sterilized jars to preserve for winter: a little jar of August sunshine for colder days.

We baked chickpea cakes to serve with grilled eggplants and roasted sweet green peppers, which had been picked just an hour earlier from my mum’s garden. We shaved zucchini paper-thin with a mandoline to make a carpaccio, and dressed a farro salad in the style of a panzanella, a definite hit with my students.

For dessert, we kept it simple: a tiramisù made with ricotta and strong coffee, and pesche al vino—diced peaches macerated in a red wine syrup—following the very same recipes I recently shared here in the newsletter.

After a quiet August, we're getting ready to resume our classes in mid-September, just in time for two of the busiest and most rewarding months of the year, blessed with the first autumn ingredients: grapes, mushrooms, and squashes.

August’s favourites from the market, vegetable garden, and the hedgerows

Tomatoes

The smell of tomato leaves is something I instantly associate with childhood summers, spent trailing after my grandma in her garden. I remember the towering walls of tomato plants, climbing up slender reeds she arranged almost like little tepees.

I was known for biting into green tomatoes straight from the vine, stubbornly ignoring the sweet, juicy red ones. I only began to appreciate them properly in my teenage years — thanks to a preserved mackerel and tomato salad that Nonna prepared for lunch one day.

These days, the tomatoes grow in raised beds that my dad built during the Covid years, using recycled wooden planks — old shutters, shelves, anything he could find. And I still love the green, unmistakable scent of their leaves, even if now I choose only the ripest, heaviest tomatoes for my quick summer meals.

When we stop at the vegetable stall during a summer market visit, tomatoes — in all their shades, shapes, and varieties — steal the scene from everything else. Big or small, thick-skinned or full of juice, bright red or tinged with pink, firm to the touch or heavy and ready to become sauce: we could talk for hours about the many types of tomatoes and how best to use them in the kitchen.

Ciliegini, datterini, fiorentini, cuore di bue, canestrini, San Marzano... Some of these tomatoes have proper names, some are defined by their place of origin or their shape. And then there are the countless varieties you can grow in your own garden, heirloom tomatoes whose seeds have been passed down from one generation to the next.

If you’d like to dive deeper into the world of Tuscan market tomatoes, I wrote a longer piece about them a couple of years ago. You can find it in the newsletter archive.

Peppers

I love Laurie Colwin’s down to earth, witty and friendly style, and I owe my renewed love for peppers to a few pages she wrote in 1988 in her Home Cooking book.

She loved red peppers so much that once she was able to eat a large bag of them as she walked home from the store. She adored red peppers fried in olive oil more than almost anything else. She described shapes, colours and recipes and she swore by the marriage of peppers and anchovies, as they were made for each other. But it is her description of roasted peppers that won my heart.

Roast the pepper over the gas burner on a skewer or long fork. The skin of the pepper will char and turn black. This is always quite fascinating to watch. Turn the pepper until it is burnt all over and then rinse off the charred skin under cold water. This roasting cooks the pepper and gives it a silky texture. At the same time it brings out its smoky taste. - Laurie Colwin, Home Cooking (1988)

August and September are the months when sweet bell peppers are at their very best. This is also when I tend to make peperonata, either during quiet afternoons spent cooking barefoot in my kitchen, or while teaching a cooking class.

Peperonata is a Southern Italian sweet-and-sour pepper stew that keeps on giving, stretching over several meals. Like many Italian stews, it’s one of those dishes that tastes even better the next day. Long live leftovers. You can find the recipe here.

My mum and I, picking blackberries in 2018

Blackberries

Blackberries taste like the very last days of summer, when you still enjoy bits of freedom and you’re just beginning to look ahead to the new rhythm of September life.

First, it was back to school. Then, back to work. Now September means back to a new season of classes, projects, long socks, warm morning teas, explorations, scarves, books to read, ingredients to welcome back into my kitchen (hello pumpkin, I’ve missed you so much!), and daily routines ready to be tweaked to fit in all the newness the season is bound to bring.

Don’t you think blackberries hold all the magic of this rite of passage? Blackberry picking is summer’s last adventure, a final farewell to carefree days, to juicy peaches dripping down your chin, to dinners al fresco and nights spent stargazing from the garden.

The shift from one season to the next is a bittersweet symphony, both soul-stirring and tinged with melancholy. And blackberries carry the taste of these mixed feelings, right up until you’re firmly rooted in autumn, wrapped in your nourishing rituals of soups and tea.

You can use blackberries to make these fig and blackberry lattice pastries or this apple and blackberry jam.

Now it’s your turn — what’s been cooking in your kitchen this August? Hit reply and tell me, or leave a comment here. I love reading your stories.

Seven tomato recipes (plus one) to fall in love with this summer

• Tomato tonnato. I’ve been eating tomato tonnato - or pomodori con la salsa tonnata, as I would call them - since I can remember. It was our lazy weeknight dinner while I was growing up, often prepared on a Monday if mum had made Vitello tonnato (roast veal smothered with tuna sauce) over the weekend.

• Caprese salad. Caprese is perhaps the dish that my mum has prepared more often in the summer since I was a child, sometimes with ox heart tomatoes, large and fleshy, sometimes with San Marzano, that I prefer when they are still slightly unripe. We have slowly brought caprese to a higher level: the oregano comes every year from the South, it is intense and balsamic, dried by the Southern sun. Now I also love tiny ciliegini, cherry tomatoes, or datterini, date tomatoes, sweet as candy, possibly in various colours: red, yellow, orange… They make such a colourful caprese salad!

• Panzanella salad. Panzanella is a Tuscan summer bread salad, an ancient yet still enormously appreciated recipe: it dates back to the Renaissance times, yet it is a constant presence in summer menus in trattorias and families. It puts to good use day-old bread and seasonal vegetables, just like pappa al pomodoro. It is a bright, refreshing, and colorful summer salad, a Tuscan staple, and the perfect way to upcycle day-old bread.

• Pappa al pomodoro. Pappa al pomodoro is one of the most representative recipes of Tuscan cucina povera. The main ingredients are stale Tuscan bread—a bread that, according to the rest of Italy, is bland, because it is made without salt—and fresh tomatoes (but a can of good peeled tomatoes works just as well).

• Pasta alla crudaiola, raw tomato sauce for pasta. This is the purest form of pasta al pomodoro, perfect for late summer tomatoes, when their flavour is so intense that they do not need heat, or other condiments, to become a sauce. Crudaiola comes from the word crudo, raw, as you’re going to use raw tomatoes to make this sauce, along with fresh basil, garlic, extra virgin olive oil, salt and pepper.

• Burst cherry tomato sauce for pasta. The tiny plump tomatoes burst for the heat and melt into the olive oil, becoming a chunky sauce flavoured with basil and garlic. Isn’t it the quintessential taste of an Italian summer? The chili pepper adds a gentle heat and a handful of pine nuts gives some texture to the sauce.

• Roasted tomato risotto. Simple as the ubiquitous pasta al pomodoro, and equally satisfying and comforting, risotto al pomodoro is an everyday dish that you can make special by using a roasted tomato sauce and a generous scoop of stracciatella cheese.

BONUS RECIPE. Pomodori ripieni di riso alla romana - Rice Stuffed Tomatoes

Excerpted from Cucina Povera by Giulia Scarpaleggia (Artisan Books). Copyright © 2023.

[By the way, Cucina Povera is still heavily discounted on Amazon.com. You can find all the links to purchase Cucina Povera—including from many wonderful independent bookstores—on the blog. And if you loved cooking from Cucina Povera, please help us by leaving a review!]

A Roman summer has the taste of a cold beer at night in Trastevere, of a glass of sour cherry grattachecca, a slushy made of hand-shaved ice and syrup, slowly sipped while queueing for the Vatican Museums, and of rice stuffed tomatoes, a fixture of deli shops, trattorias, and family menus.