Years ago, I was served butternut squash broth as part of a dinner by a chef called Toto Dell’Aringa. It was a great dinner, but it was also during a year of hellish ear infections and I was dosed up on painkillers. Which is why I remember so little about the evening, beyond a steep modern staircase with no railing and that broth, which had stuffed pasta bobbing around in it. Not that I can remember the pasta shape or what it was stuffed with. Only the orange, savoury-sweet butternut liquor, and how it was full of flavour and also how, when eaten with my head tilted to one side, it felt like a warm, internal compress. An odd compliment, I know, but also the highest one.
Both the English word broth and the Italian word brodo have the same root, the proto-Germanic bruþą, which means “to boil, bubble, effervesce” in relation to both cooking and brewing, also a “liquid in which something has been boiled”. Another definition is from the Roman writer Ada Boni, who describes brodo as a liquid to which meat, fish or vegetables have gifted flavour. That’s not only a good description, but also one that makes whatever is in the pan seem big-hearted, giving away the best of itself.
