Acquacotta: Rachel Roddy’s recipe for vegetable broth with poached eggs | A kitchen in Rome

How do you like your water cooked? This version from Tuscany – beans, spuds, tomatoes, parmesan, garlic, lashings of olive oil – sounds rather delicious

Mary Eaton was from Bungay in Suffolk. It is her 1823 recipe for Vegetable Water Soup that Florence White included in her practical cookery book, Good Things in England. Half a cabbage, four carrots, two parsnips, two onions, three turnips, celery and parsley root, white beet, chervil and half a pint of peas are tied up in linen, then boiled, before being chopped up and served in the broth. The recipe doesn’t mention eggs or bread, but there is a good chance they were added. Meanwhile, in Maremma, a geographical area that straddles south-west Tuscany and parts of northern Lazio, similar soups are called acquacotta, or cooked water.

There are as many versions of acquacotta as there are cooks who make it. Around Saturnia, a town in the Tuscan bit of Maremma famous for warm water in the form of shooting sulphurous hot springs, recipes often start by cooking onion and tomatoes in olive oil. I have written about this before. In his book about Tuscan food, Alvaro Maccioni has a particularly good version that also includes red peppers. (As well as a rustic anecdote about an old man called Melito, who, just after the war, would stop his wooden cart to allow his horse to drink from a bucket and later use the same bucket to make soup.) Other recipes, such as those from the town of Pitigliano, often include wild greens, while variations from Arezzo typically include dried or fresh mushrooms.

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