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My Love Letter to the Pantry ❤️

To the pantry, that makes me feel safe, protected, loved, taken care of
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Thanks to Substack, we can try the new video feature, which in the coming months will give us the chance to take you with us into the kitchen, to the market, and to the garden. I hope you will enjoy it, as there will be new videos coming soon!

To the pantry, that makes me feel safe, protected, loved, taken care of

I was about thirteen when our middle school teacher gave us an essay about our favourite room as homework. I described the pantry. I could have easily talked about the bedroom I was sharing with my sister, where I had all my books and secrets, or the living room where I used to spend most of my days, doing my homework, watching tv, reading, napping on the sofa. But no, I chose the pantry.

It was, and it still is, an under-stair pantry, a tiny dark room with a stamp-sized window. That room looked to me like Ali Baba’s cave, full of treasures and unexpected findings.

That pantry made me feel safe, protected, loved, taken care of.

My mum would store in her pantry all the tomato preserves she had made during summer: the pelati, peeled tomatoes bottled with a single basil leaf; the passata, the simplest tomato purée made for pizza and as a starting point for pasta sauces; and the pomarola, a darker, flavourful tomato sauce enriched with carrots, celery, onion, and parsley. This would only need a knob of butter to dress a bowl of spaghetti or penne.

The tomato preserves would cover a whole shelf. Then there were all the summer jams. Mum would start with the first apricots at the beginning of the good season, producing a few jars in a bright orange hue. Then would come the time of plums: a ruby red jam, slightly sour, and my favourite for crostata, the Italian equivalent of a pie, a shell of shortcrust and a filling of jam.

Blackberry jam was the preserve my mum would take the most pride in, as this meant waking up at dawn to venture down our country road to the edges of the woods, where the blackberries grow protected by the shade of tall trees, not far from a stream. There, she would pick the berries one by one, fighting against brambles, bees, and horseflies. Then, she would come back home in the mid-morning, her arms scratched by thorns, and immediately make her famous jam in a big pot sputtering on the stove. It is a thick, velvety jam, almost black with bluish hues, my favourite on buttered slices of bread for breakfast.

To this day, whenever I enter her pantry, I feel calm, protected. I search for the jars with her well known handwritten labels, for the dried figs she makes during the summer, or the precious jars of eggplants preserved in oil.

It is there that my love for the pantry was born.

In my house, the pantry is a tangible companion. In this sacred space, I collect jars of homemade preserves, compotes, and pickled vegetables, bottles of extra virgin olive oil, a collection of several kinds of flours, from the high protein bread flour to my beloved chickpea and chestnut flour, bags of legumes, jars of canned tomatoes, nuts, dark chocolate, dry pasta, a handful of rice varieties, barley, farro, oats, and rye berries, my homemade candied orange and citron peels, my provisions of capers, sun-dried tomatoes, and dried oregano from Salento. My love for the pantry goes hand in hand with my passion for preserving the season.

Living in the countryside, we tend to shop once a week, so I feel the urge to keep a well-stocked pantry, as I do not want to venture back in town if there’s an ingredient missing. In fact, this pantry-driven approach to cooking teaches you to focus on what you have, rather than on what you are missing. I take pride in my jars aligned on the shelves. I feel safe knowing that whatever would happen, I have some pasta, beans, tomato sauce, canned tuna, or anchovies to whip up a meal fit for a queen. I am an avid supporter of a well-stocked pantry not because I love to splurge on ingredients, but because having your supplies well organized, varied, and possibly bought on bulks directly from producers or homemade is a way to eat well, keeping an eye on the budget, too.

Even though I try to meal plan, to have an idea of what we are going to eat through the week, I love nothing more than improvising a meal from what I can source in my pantry.

It is creative, simple, and liberating. But to be highly effective, you must work on your pantry first.

That’s why on Valentine’s Day, I’ve written a love letter to the pantry, one of my first loves, a faithful companion, a lifelong friend.


Letters from Tuscany is one!

It has been one year since we pioneered this new platform, betting on the renewed role of newsletters to build a community. We talked about porchetta and lasagne, a buckwheat cake from Alto Adige and pittule from Salento, we shared a foodie guide to Salento and Matera, and a month of comfort food.

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Authors
Giulia Scarpaleggia