Bronzino's Green Panzanella

Author Notes

While you’ll often find this rustic countryside salad with stale bread, ripe tomatoes, cucumber, onion, and basil, the original version did not in fact have tomatoes. The Italian peninsula didn’t get tomatoes until the sixteenth century (from the Americas via Spain). For another century, the Italians didn’t cook or eat them since they were suspicious of them and only use them as ornamental plants. During this time, the Florentine Mannerist painter Bronzino (a contemporary of Michelangelo) penned a sort of recipe-poem about a dish that in all ways resembles a tomato-less panzanella, a dish he compares to a “trip across the stars.” It combined stale bread, arugula, basil, cucumber, and onion.
The key to this salad is the stale Tuscan bread, which should take up half the salad. It has an incredible consistency when soaked in water: Rather than becoming soggy, it holds its shape and springiness. The best breads to use are country breads that have a good, dark crust on them—if possible, even wood-fired. Sourdough is a good consistency, but the flavor can be overpowering in this salad (Tuscan bread is saltless and therefore very neutral in dishes). Many non-Italian recipes for panzanella call for toasting the bread, but this is unorthodox and won’t produce the same results. If you can, plan for this salad and buy the bread at least 2 days before you need it, perhaps even slicing it so that it can start drying out.

However you choose to make this—with a little more of this, a little less of that—keep in mind that the bread should make up half of the volume of this salad. NOTE: This dish is best eaten about an hour after preparing, to give time for the flavors to combine. That said, it does not keep well for more than a day because the fresh ingredients tend to get ruined by the vinegar. —Emiko