Cialledd’ alla Contadina

A sort of Lucanian stone soup, this is from Basilicata’s long repertoire of dishes built from almost nothing at all. Once the sustenance of shepherds who could concoct the dish with a handful of wild grasses and the simple stores they carried, too, it was often the family supper of the contadini—the farmers—whose ascetic lives asked that each bit of bread nourish them. I offer it here as balm, a pastoral sort of medicine, one of the thousand historical, wizened prescripts known to soothe and sustain.