Tuna panzanella

In Tuscany in August, our nonna refused to turn on the oven. Not for bread, not for pasta, not for the love of God. She would slice yesterday's bread, drench it in tomato juice and olive oil, and tell us that was lunch. We would sulk. Then we would eat the whole bowl and ask for more. Ti avevo detto, she would say, I told you.

The panzanella we grew up with had no tuna, no capers, no canned additions of any kind. Just stale country bread, sun-warm tomatoes from her garden, cucumber, red onion from the same garden, fresh basil, a hard white onion the size of a tennis ball, a generous amount of olive oil that our grandfather pressed himself at the village mill, and a splash of vinegar from a bottle that must have lived in the same cupboard for a decade. The bread was never toasted. It was stale, torn into chunks, almost rehydrated by the tomato juice into something between bread and salad and a small perfect dream. We will never have a panzanella that good again, because that panzanella required a specific garden, a specific olive oil, a specific summer, and our nonna, and those things are not available on demand.

What follows is a panzanella for the rest of us, living in cities with supermarket bread and supermarket tomatoes and no garden. Canned tuna moves it from refreshing summer salad to complete lunch, which is the whole point of this cookbook. The rest is just good technique: salt the tomatoes first so they weep juice, soak the onion in cold water so it doesn't dominate, let the whole thing sit for ten minutes before eating so the bread has time to drink up what the vegetables released. Eat it by an open window. Try not to miss the Tuscan garden.