At the table Katherine Larson

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

“What 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 embraces 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

Story by Katherine Larson

in a little bag and forgot about it until now. Haul it out and praise your own foresight.

Of course, nothing prevents you now from going to the cheese store and asking them to sell you a piece of Parmesan rind. Where I shop, they occasionally offer little containers labeled “soup bones” filled with scraps of rind. They aren’t bones at all in the anatomic sense, of course, but boy do they impart richness to minestrone.

If your family isn’t watching its fat intake, just toss the rind into the pot. When the soup is cooked, it will provide an amazingly juicy cheesy mass that my children, at least, always fought over. If your family is being careful about fat, wrap the rind in a bit of cheesecloth and fish it out at the end of the process. It will have infused the minestrone with flavor anyway.

This is also the point where you add beans: cannellini or borlotti or pinto.

Here I’m going to put in a word for home-cooked beans. Their flavor and texture are incomparable, and if you plan ahead by putting them to soak the night before they don’t add materially to the overall cooking time. But there’s yet another pot to wash, and I am realistic about the degree to which planning ahead fits with the hurly-burly of modern life. Canned beans are fine too. Just be sure to drain and thoroughly rinse them before using.

Of course, if you are blessed with leftover home-cooked beans from another meal, this is the place to use them. In fact, the presence in your fridge of leftover homecooked beans is a terrific reason to decide to make minestrone in the first place.

How many beans? Maybe a cup and a half, cooked. Whole or pureed? I like them whole or lightly mashed; some people prefer to puree about half the beans in a food processor to thicken the broth even more. (More dishes to wash…)

So you added your rind and your beans to the pot. Let everything simmer slowly, with the pot partially covered, for another 45 minutes.

Are we done yet? Not quite. There’s still the pasta.

Do you expect to eat all this minestrone in one sitting, or will it last several days? The longer it sits, the soggier the pasta will get. Accordingly, if you are making this soup with the expectation that it will provide you with lunches for a week, consider cooking the pasta separately, tossing it with a little olive oil when done to keep it from sticking, and then adding only the amount you want each time you heat up a bit of minestrone.

If, however, this minestrone is destined for consumption within a day or two— maybe as the backbone of a family meal before or after Halloween’s trick-or-treating—go ahead and toss half a cup of small pasta into the pot now. I like the small fun shapes, like ditalini or little stars, especially when feeding children; again, consider how it will fit on their spoons.

Fifteen minutes worth of more simmering should get the pasta cooked and the minestrone finished. It’s ready to eat right away, or later; it’ll taste even better tomorrow; it can be served piping hot (in wintry times) or warm or room temperature (in that last moment of early-fall warmth).

At this point, you have prepared something that bears strong kinship to Italian peasant food as served for millennia: Fully two thousand years ago, in De Re Coquinaria, Marcus Apicius described a Roman soup comprising farro, chickpeas, fava beans, onions, garlic, lard, and greens. Sounds like a pretty good minestrone to me; ours includes some additions from the Western Hemisphere (tomatoes, potatoes) but pretty much follows the same idea.

Nowadays, however, we can add a bit of pizzazz without departing from the heart of minestrone. Besides the almost-obligatory grind of fresh black pepper, in Liguria they add a stir of fresh pesto. A big sprinkling of fresh basil or sage or rosemary, maybe chopped with some fresh garlic, would add similar oomph. Some freshly-grated Parmigiano-Reggiano is always welcome. Or place a piece of toast rubbed with garlic in the bowl before ladling minestrone over it. Let your imagination run wild.

A word for the carnivorous: my friend Lucas’ family is vegetarian, so here I’ve focused on a vegetarian minestrone. Indeed, given the perilous state of our planet, an occasional vegetarian meal is good for us all. But if the people you are cooking for don’t believe that they have been fed unless some meat appears somewhere, that’s easy to manage.

We do not have to imitate Marcus Apicius and add cooked brains; in fact, count me out on that one. We can, however, add a rind of prosciutto or a more prosaic ham at the cheese-rind stage, in addition to the Parmigiano-Reggiano. Or we can add an ounce of minced salami or pancetta to the onion-cabbage saute. Either or both of these additions will provide a meatier taste to the minestrone without causing it to lose its essential character.

That essential character harkens back to its name. We gather the vegetables at hand according to season, we cook them with imagination and care, and then we serve forth the result—we minister to the needs of those we love. Buon appetito!

About the author: For Katherine Larson, good things come in threes: three daughters, three grandchildren, and three careers. Lawyering and teaching were fun, but food writing is the most fun of all. She loves food justice, food history, and all things delicious.