When was your last bowl of hearty, delicious, nutritious minestrone? This classic but adaptable vegetable soup seems to have slipped off menus and off the radar of home cooks like me. Yet, it deserves to be rediscovered, explored, and adapted for today’s food lovers.
Jacqueline Church’s pot of minestrone is not only delicious, nutritious, filling, and economical, it’s also vegan. A soup for all eaters! (photo credit: Jacqueline Church)
Great Minds …
Food writer Rachel Roddy featured minestrone in one of her recent columns for the Guardian. She wrote that minestrone, “… sums up the Italian knack for taking the most basic and economic ingredients and bringing them together in a delicious way.” She referred to her trusted Italian food experts, like Marcella Hazan, when writing about all the regional and seasonal variations on this pot of goodness.
Roddy's book My Kitchen in Rome: Recipes and Notes on Italian Cooking is one of my favorite cookbooks from the past year.
From my own bookshelf, I reached for Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s “The Italian Country Table” and found a summer minestrone that she says should be served at room temperature. This was followed by her more traditional recipe for the soup with serving variations and a brilliant two-page spread of tips for perfecting your own pot of vegetables and broth.
"Eating Down the Fridge’ Meal …"
A few days later, Jacqueline Church, culinary instructor at Brookline Adult & Community Education and private cooking coach, posted a photo of a steaming pot of vegan minestrone on her Facebook feed. Since I always seem to learn something new from this food educator, I asked her what she loves about this soup.
Her answer was, “It's perfect for an ‘eating down the fridge’ meal, key ingredients can be kept on hand in the pantry: box or can of beans, dried porcini, handful of pasta, can or box of tomatoes. In the fridge, we almost always have carrots, celery, onion. Add a bit of cabbage languishing in the bin, some seasonal squash (zucchini in the summer, butternut in the winter) a few potatoes. With kidney beans and porcini you've got umami (strain the soaking liquid and add that) so the whole thing can be customized to what you have on hand. Hearty and satisfying, it may be the ultimate comfort food!”
Finally, one of the chilly days we spent in Provincetown recently was warmed by a "Spring Minestrone" with chard, peas, carrots, and chicken from the wonderful food team at The Canteen.
Learning Experience
This is also an excellent soup for cooks to learn basic skills. Roddy writes, “Minestrone is made with a staggered march into the pan. By adding the ingredients gradually you lay down foundations of flavour, one thing sizzling gently while you chop the next. Once everything is in the pan – including the marvellous, umami parmesan rind if you have one – let everything simmer, slowly, until the flavours have come together.”
The Italians call this process, “insaporire” which sort of translates to “making tasty.” Marcella Hazan describes it as drawing out the flavor of an ingredient or set of ingredients before adding the next one. It’s like sweating onions, celery, and carrots in oil before adding broth or meat.
Big Soup!
Perhaps restaurants found that if customers ordered a bowl of minestrone, they filled up on it and didn’t order much food to follow. In Italian the word for soup is minestra. The suffix “-one” adds the concept of “big.” Therefore minestrone means big soup.
But that doesn't mean it has to be a heavy, wintertime soup. Perhaps this is the time of year for a green minestrone. I found Joanne Weir’s recipe for that in Food and Wine. She uses many of the first green vegetables we find at the farmers markets. It has leeks, fennel, peas, asparagus, Swiss chard, and mint with just a shaving of Parmesan on top.
Buon Appetito!
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Words: Penny & Ed Cherubino
Photos: ©2017 Penny & Ed Cherubino
(Adapted for BostonZest from one of our Fresh & Local newspaper columns.)