In the old days, when bread was baked at home, not every day but enough to last at least a week, any leftover bread was ingenuously recycled in many inventive ways. Bread pudding, a common dessert all over the world, is made with stale bread in a mixture of various ingredients, like sugar, milk, eggs, cinnamon, vanilla, other spices or fruits and nuts, and baked until it forms a golden crust. In Tuscany, the Pappa al Pomodoro is a mixture of simple, savory ingredients, boiled to form apappa, or mangiare which means “food.”

These old and popular dishes are common where bread is part of the everyday diet; it does not have an original recipe but is the product of the imagination of the cook or housewife preparing it and determined by the ingredients locally available. The panzanella or pan molle, also popular in Tuscany and in central Italy, is a salad made with a mixture of stale bread, tomatoes and fresh and tasty olive oil, abundant in the region. In the northeast of the peninsula, canederli are made from old bread, speck, a type of prosciutto or ham, cheese, eggs, onions and parsley, then cooked in broth. Similar specialties are made, with some variances, in the bordering Croatia, Austria, Germany and other European states.

In the southern part of Italy, a variety of dishes are developed from leftover bread in many, various and creative ways. In Sicily, the plentiful cheese and eggs are coupled with breadcrumbs, made with hard and old bread, to create cheese balls. These little balls are cooked in chicken or meat broth to become light, spongy and delicious dumplings.