at the table
The difference between summer minestrone and winter minestrone is all in the vegetables you choose. For those who enjoy dairy products, a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano rind adds magic. (Katherine Larson photo)
Making Minestrone
The Italian soup is the perfect dish anytime during October
“W
hat would you like to read about in the October issue of MM?” I asked. Lucas answered without hesitation. “Soup. There’s something about October that cries out for soup.” He’s right, of course, and the soup to cry out for is minestrone. It’s a wonderfully variable dish: its summer versions delectable in October’s earlier sunny days and its winter versions heartening in the icy blasts which mark the end of the month. Minestrone’s Italian origins are reflected in its name as well as in the dish itself. The Italian word minestra means, literally, “that which is served.” It shares roots with the English word minister, and how better to minister to our loved ones’ needs than to ply them with soup? Not just any soup. The Italian suffix “-one” tells us that the minestra is big and robust, in the same way that those tiny tortellini pastas grow to be solid, well-stuffed tortellone. Thus, Italians can ask for zuppa (a broth-based soup served over toast), minestra (a vegetable soup), or a hearty minestrone—our topic for today. So if it’s so hearty, how can we make a summer-style minestrone? The answer lies largely in the vegetables we choose. The summer-style soup uses the last of those glorious late-summer vegetables: zucchini, sweet peppers, tomatoes. The winter-style soup heaves a sigh and then embrac-
Story by Katherine Larson
es our later crops: kale, cabbages, carrots, potatoes. Onions and garlic belong to both. What do we do with these vegetables? We layer them— the process described by the legendary Marcella Hazan as insaporire. Sure, it’s possible to cut up a bunch of veggies and toss them in a pot with some broth and beans until everything melts into each other. But if you do that you’ll get a vegetable soup that won’t deserve the “-one” suffix. To get a true minestrone, you want the complexity of flavor that comes from treating the vegetables in a more complex way. So here’s a basic outline, to be riffed on depending on what vegetables fall to hand. Gather your basic vegetables: maybe a couple of onions, a carrot, a stalk of celery, a potato, some green beans, a couple of smallish zucchini, a bit of kale, a couple of tomatoes… Chop them up. The rule is simple: make the pieces of a size that you and your loved ones would like to encounter in a soup spoon. If you like big hunks, cut them that way. If you like smaller dice so that multiple vegetables fit into a single spoonful, cut them that way. Thinking ahead here will enhance your eaters’ experience to a surprising degree. Now set aside about a third of your chopped onions, plus maybe a bit of leftover cabbage similarly chopped, for later. Pour a thin film of olive oil into the bottom of your soup pot. Add the onions, minus what you set aside, to the pot;
stir to coat it with the warm oil; and let it sauté for two or three minutes. Now add the carrots and give them their time to blossom. Then the celery. Then the potato. Add the vegetables that exude liquid—green beans, zucchini, kale, tomato—last and in succession, driest to wettest, so that each vegetable gets its full opportunity to sauté before there’s too much liquid. Finally, add enough water to cover everything by about an inch, cover the pot, and let it all simmer very gently for about 45 minutes. In the meantime, get out a skillet—yes, this minestrone requires several pots, but it’s worth it—and film it with more olive oil. Over medium-high heat, sauté the cabbage and onions that you set aside, along with a few fresh sage leaves, until it’s all a deep golden brown. Toss in some minced parsley and basil along with three or four cloves of garlic, chopped, to cook for one more minute. Add this robust mixture to the vegetables that you simmered in water. Slosh a little more water into the skillet to collect any of those wonderfully tasty brown bits that may have been left behind and add that to the soup pot too; the goal is, once more, for everything to be covered by about an inch of water. Now comes magic: a rind of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. If you splurged on the real stuff from Italy a while ago, you’ll remember how you grated it and loved it and grated it and loved it until all that was left was the rind. And you’ll remember that you stuck that rind in the freezer
October 2021
Marquette Monthly
27
