Imagine a nice plate of spaghetti with tomato sauce. Abundant, steaming, irresistible. Now imagine taking your fork, rolling the pasta around it and... filling your mouth with pure pleasure. Forkful after forkful, till there’s nothing solid left on your plate. Not even a lone piece of spaghetti.
Now what? All that’s left is that delicious tomato sauce. And if you’re thinking of leaving it there, that’s only because you don’t realize that it’s offering you a moment of pure enjoyment: the scarpetta. Never tried it? Have no fear. This is a technique that has been know to trigger fits of bliss.
What is scarpetta?
In Italy, scarpetta means sopping up all the sauce left on your plate (or in the pot) with bread. The literal meaning of the term is “little shoe,” which comes from the fact that a shoe, just like the bread on the plate, drags up what’s on the ground. Another theory says that the term scarpetta comes from the dialect word scarsetta, which means scarcity: a condition that obliged the poorer classes to get as much nourishment as possible from a dish, not wasting even a trace of leftover sauce.
How it’s done
Doing a scarpetta is simple and fun. Take a piece of bread, hold it between your thumb, index and middle fingers and use the soft part (not the crust) to collect the sauce left on the plate. Keep wiping until the plate is shiny clean!
The polite version
What we just explained is the quickest, funnest and most popular way to do a scarpetta. You can certainly do it with your hands when you’re with your family, friends or at very informal restaurants. But it’s generally considered bad table manners on more formal occasions. In these cases, you still shouldn’t miss out on the chance to enjoy this treat. Instead, you should pierce the crust of a piece of bread with your fork and use that to collect all the remaining sauce.
Which bread to use
The best bread for picking up and absorbing sauce is Puglian bread, which has a thin and well-cooked crust and a generous amount of soft bread inside that’s perfect for collecting sauce. But the scarpetta is really an expression of freedom, a spontaneous, carefree gesture that flies in the face of established rules. We invite you to experiment with different kinds of bread until you find your favorite (focaccia included).
The sauce
And feel free to sop up not just any kind of tomato sauce, ragù or pesto, but also the sauce from whatever meat and vegetables are left over on your plates, or even in your pots and pans!