Minestrone

History

Minestrone is less a fixed recipe than a category: a thick vegetable soup whose name is the augmentative of minestra, "that which is served," from minestrare, "to serve." Its lineage runs back to the plain grain-and-vegetable pottages of Roman cooking, and it long belonged to cucina povera, built from whatever the season and larder allowed, so it has no precise recipe and varies widely across Italy. 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. Artusi published his minestrone in La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene (1891), the self-published book that first gathered regional home cooking into a single national canon two decades after unification. Characteristically, 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, expressly inviting cooks to adapt it to local taste and whatever vegetables are at hand. His headnote is not history but personal anecdote: a bowl eaten in Livorno in 1855 that he first cursed, then half-credited, on the eve of a cholera outbreak he fled.

Ingredients

• boiled-meat broth
• fresh shelled beans
• savoy cabbage
• spinach
• chard
• g fatty prosciutto
• clove garlic
• parsley
• celery
• carrot
• potato
• 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.