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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for white beans and chard with bacon or eggs
A rustic bowl of Roman comfort food: a soup-stew laced with olive oil, traditionally cooked in a terracotta pot, to be devoured with bacon or eggs
I worry about the small kitchenware shop just across the square; that it doesn’t have enough customers and is going to close, and that, if it does, it will be my fault. If it is a particularly intense moment of guilt, I tell Vincenzo how worried I am about the shop we can see through our kitchen window and warn him that, if it shuts, we’ll be to blame, because we didn’t go enough. “So, go” is his usual reply – correct, but so annoying in its straightforwardness that it is not helpful.
But then, later, I do go. The shop is not much bigger than an emperor-sized bed, low-lit, functional, and entering it is like travelling back in time. All three walls have floor-to-ceiling wooden shelves divided into boxes. Those on the left and behind the counter are packed with cleaning products – cloths, scourers, pegs, bags, doormats, foil, loo brushes, moth balls and a large selection of dusters – and those on the right with pots, pans, crockery and accessories (though this feels an inappropriate word for the spoons and strainers in this shop). The shelves on the right also hold a selection of glazed terracotta pots: chocolate-brown on the outside and toffee-coloured within, some shallow, others deep, some the size of cymbals, others smaller than a fried egg, some with a single side handle, others with two – the most beautiful of which is the bean pot.