Rachel Roddy’s recipe for pisarei, or leftover bread pasta

Just like the other three bowls on the top shelf, the wooden salad bowl is full. However, unlike the other bowls, with their pick’n’mix of clothes pegs, coins, aspirin, Ikea pencils, cables, wet wipes, sunglasses, business cards, Kinder Surprise figures and Sellotape chewed by the dog, the salad bowl is a holding (or dumping) place for just one thing: bread crusts. In Italian, the crust of a loaf of bread is sometimes referred to as il culo or culetto, meaning bottom or little bottom, making this a bowl of bottoms.

Its position on the highest shelf, plus the depth of the bowl, means I can’t be reminded of what’s inside until there are enough crusts that they start rising, like brown icebergs, above the rim. Then follows a period of days (or weeks) during which I keep seeing those tips, and reminding myself to do something with them, but don’t, so they continue to rise, and when the morning sun hits the shelves, I can see the dust drifting and settling. Eventually, I take the bowl down from the shelf and examine the contents; it then sits on the table for a day or two before I make breadcrumbs, ideally drying the already-dry bread in a low oven, which makes it brittle and reduces to crumbs more easily. (Less than ideal is putting them straight into a food processor, which has a rattle worse than a set of keys in the washing machine, and produces uneven crumbs.)

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The bowl had been untouched for months when it yielded four ziplock bags of uneven crumbs, which I tried to put in the freezer along with other bags of crumbs, but realised I needed another option for the contents of the salad bowl. The answer came from Emilia-Romagna, where the pasta culture is not only an enriched one of lasagne and of pork and parmesan tortellini bobbing in a broth, but a resourceful one of pastas made with leftover bread. This makes such good sense: bread is flour and water and, as it dries (and loses water), its elastic form returns to a floury form that can be reduced to crumbs, or soaked and squished into a malleable dough.

Perhaps the best known of these shapes are passatelli, which are made by pressing a breadcrumb, parmesan and egg dough through a perforated spoon straight into broth. An even more resourceful shape is the bread, flour and water gnocchi-like pisarei, which translates (according to the food historian Oretta Zanini de Vita) as baby willies. Oretta also notes that historical pasta names alluding to genitalia are not rare, which also makes me reconsider those multicoloured bags of pasta sold in gift shops. Pisarei also have a sacred name: cazzetti d’angelo, or angels’ willies.

Back to the leftover bread, which is the starting point. Weigh it, bearing in mind you want about 300g for four people and that you are going to use equal parts bread, water and flour. Break (or cut) the bread into bits, cover with an equal amount of water, then leave to sit. After about 20 minutes, squeeze the bread (it should by now be soft and pulpy); if it still feels a bit lumpy, add a little more water and wait a few minutes more.

Now add 300g (or an equal amount of) plain flour and bring everything together into a firm, malleable dough. Roll the dough into a 1cm rope, cut it into centimetre-long nuggets, then roll them across a butter paddle or the side of a grater to get a curve on one side and ridges on the other.

Cook the bean-sized pisarei in well-salted boiling water for about five minutes; their puffy, buoyant nature is a reminder that they contain bread. Traditionally, pisarei are served with beans cooked in a little tomato sauce, which has lovely symmetry, with the beans sitting in the curve and the sauce clinging to the ridges. Alternatives are vegetable ragu, sausage ragu or mushy broccoli – that is, broccoli boiled until soft and then cooked again with olive oil.