Bordatino, the Tuscan recipe

Polenta cooked in bean and black cabbage broth: this is Tuscan bordatino, a simple but substantial soup perfect for the cold season.

Bordatino is a typical dish of Tuscan cuisine , in particular of Pisa and Livorno. Even in the kitchen, in fact, the two cities do not stop competing in the attempt to win the paternity of the recipe. But we'll talk about the history of the dish later, first let's focus on what it is.

Tuscan bordatino is a sort of "slow" polenta, that is, soft, cooked in the cooking broth of the beans . To this is added black cabbage , a vegetable that is the protagonist of many recipes in the region. In the Livorno-style bordatino we then find the addition of pancetta to the sauté, which however can easily be omitted, especially if you wish to keep this Tuscan soup vegan.

How to prepare the bordatino recipe

1. The night before, soak the beans, possibly changing the water once. You can use cannellini, borlotti or red beans. Drain them and transfer them to a pot, cooking them for 2 hours or until they are tender (in a pressure cooker they are ready in about an hour). Only lastly add the salt .
2. Finely chop the celery , carrot , onion and garlic and brown them in a pan with the oil .
3. In the meantime, clean the black cabbage by removing the hard central rib and cutting it into strips. Add it to the sauce and cook for 5 minutes.
4. Add a ladle of the bean broth and leave to cook with the lid on for another 15 minutes.
5. Blend half the beans and keep the others whole then add them together with their broth (you need 1.5 l). Bring to the boil before pouring in the corn flour .
6. Cook for 50 minutes (10 in the case of pre-cooked polenta flour) then serve piping hot, completing with freshly ground black pepper and a drizzle of raw oil .

To speed up the recipe you can use 2 cans of already cooked beans, also keeping the preserving liquid. This will be diluted with vegetable broth until you reach the 1.5 liters of broth required by the recipe. As mentioned, you can enrich the initial sauté by adding 100 g of diced bacon (or lard ).

Here is a video where all the steps to make the recipe are illustrated.

If you love soups, then stay in Tuscany with onionata , a local version of the most famous onion soup.

Conservation

The border can be stored for 2-3 days in the refrigerator. If it thickens too much, add a drop of water or broth before heating it.

History and origin of the dish

The bordatino seems to have landed in Livorno around 1700 together with the ships transporting buckwheat flour. This is in fact the first ingredient used to make a simple soup which, although today has beans as the protagonists, was once prepared with fish broth .

In short, this recipe went from seafood soup to country dish in the blink of an eye, enriched with beans and black cabbage , two ingredients very often used in Tuscan cuisine. Buckwheat was soon replaced with corn flour, giving rise to a delicious polenta cooked in bean broth.

This soup owes its name to the fact that it was prepared on board ships and fishing boats . However, there are those who trace its origin to the folds formed by the corn flour poured into the broth, similar to those of a striped fabric known as piping.

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