Easy, versatile farro salads for all seasons

The two dishes that follow are more a description of an idea, rather than actual recipes. The idea is simple: cook a grain (in this case, farro), add vegetables (raw or cooked, depending on what you have available), then add cheese, if necessary — and there is a quintessentially Mediterranean meal. Farro has been grown on the Italian peninsula since Roman times. Farro and other grains were an essential weapon of the masses in the war for survival. Soups, grains and porridges were the food of the poor, often flavoured with scraps of a slaughtered animal or dried beans, and whatever vegetables were at hand. You can still find farro soups with pig’s trotters and pork rinds in some parts of Italy.