Minestrone

History

Minestrone is less a fixed recipe than a category: a thick vegetable soup, built from whatever the season and the larder allow, which is why it has no settled formula and varies widely across Italy. The name is the augmentative of *minestra* — the big minestra.

The beans and tomato that anchor most versions came from the Americas and were, by the nineteenth century, thoroughly at home in Italian kitchens. Artusi's own recipe folds in fresh shelled *fagioli* and a little tomato *sugo* or *conserva* without remark. He presents his Tuscan-leaning version — a *soffritto* of fatty prosciutto, garlic and parsley, mixed greens and roots, rice to finish — as one refined attempt after three tries, and expressly invites cooks to adapt it to local taste and whatever vegetables are at hand.

What he puts at the head of the recipe is not history but a story about himself. He was at Livorno in the bathing season of 1855, with cholera moving through the provinces and everyone in fear of a general outbreak. He went into a trattoria on a Saturday evening, was offered minestrone, ate it, took a walk and went to bed — and the night that followed left him cursing the soup before he came round to half-crediting it.

The older lineage the dish is usually given — Roman grain-and-vegetable pottages, and a long life as poor people's food — and the etymology of its name, we learned from popular reference and food-writing sources, and we were unable to locate the evidence they rest on.

Ingredients

• boiled-meat broth
• fresh shelled beans
• savoy cabbage
• spinach
• chard
• 40 g fatty prosciutto
• 1 clove garlic
• parsley
• celery
• carrot
• 1 potato
• 1 zucchini
• onion
• pork rind
• tomato sauce or paste
• rice
• parmesan
• salt
• pepper

Instructions

1. Set the usual boiled meat going; cook a handful of fresh shelled beans apart in the broth (half-cook dried beans in water first).
2. Cut savoy cabbage, spinach and a little chard in thin strips, soak, then dry them off over heat and drain well, pressing.
3. Make a battuto of 40 g fatty prosciutto, a garlic clove and parsley; sweat it.
4. Add celery, carrot, potato, zucchini and a little onion in thin strips, then the beans, optional pork rind and a little tomato; season and cook in broth.
5. Add enough rice for the minestrone to come out nearly dry; before serving, stir in a good pinch of parmesan.