Minestrone

Autumn is a good time to make minestrone soup as it uses so many vegetables that are in season. This year we are blessed with our best ever tomato crop, as well as onions, beans and carrots. My new herb bed is also doing well.

There are many versions of minestrone soup. All contain tomatoes, onions, bacon or lardons, carrots, herbs and beans. I sometimes put in spaghetti, broken very small, in place of rice and a little lovage in place of the celery. It is important not to unbalance the flavour by using too many tomatoes.

Curiously there is no recipe for minestrone soup in Claudia Roden’s The Food of Italy, but Anna del Conte is ever reliable and her recipe in Italian Kitchen is a classic. I use vegetable stock as well as water whenever I have any saved from the previous day’s cooking; minestrone can be the perfect soup for a Monday evening, followed by cold roast beef.

2 tbsp olive oil
30g butter
120g unsmoked pancetta (or unsmoked streaky bacon, chopped)
2 onions, coarsely chopped
4-5 sage leaves, snipped
1 tbsp flat-leaf parsley, chopped
2 carrots, peeled and diced
2 celery sticks, diced
2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced
120g green beans, topped and tailed, cut into 2cm pieces
225g courgette, diced
225g tin chopped tomatoes or same weight of fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
2.5 litres water (or vegetable stock)
225g Savoy cabbage, cut into strips
150g Italian rice
400g canned borlotti beans or equivalent of fresh or cooked dried borlotti beans
Freshly grated Parmesan cheese to serve

Heat the oil and butter in a large casserole of heavy saucepan. Add the pancetta and sauté for two minutes. Add the onions, sage and parsley and fry gently for five minutes. Add the carrots, celery, potatoes and garlic and fry for a further two minutes

Add most of the the water (or vegetable stock), tomatoes and season. Cover the pan and cook at a very slow simmer for ‘a minimum’ of 1½ hours. (As Anna del Conte comments, ‘do not think that the vegetables will break, they do not’.)

About 30 minutes before you want to eat, add the cabbage and cook for 15 minutes, then add the rice (or broken spaghetti), the drained canned beans (or cooked borlotti beans) and continue cooking, uncovered, until the rice (or spaghetti) is al dente. Check seasoning and to see if more liquid should be added.

Serve with a bowl of Parmesan cheese on the side.

This soup almost benefits from having been made a day in advance and can be served cold but as Anna del Conte warns,’not straight form the fridge’.

Footnote:

William was puzzled by my needing to look up a recipe for minestrone. ‘Surely you just put it all in a pot’, he quipped. I agreed that I had been making minestrone without needing a recipe for years but that, once in a while, it was good to check with a ‘template’.

I then thought to look up Antonio Carluccio’s recipe for minestrone in An Invitation to Italian Cooking.

‘This soup is so well known throughout the world that it is certainly not necessary for me to give translation…

Normally this is prepared with whatever leftover vegetables are to be found in the kitchen, and so to list precise ingredients needed for a minestrone would be nonsensical, even dictatorial!’

He goes one to say that the one essential ingredient for minestrone is Parma ham, even adding skin or end pieces that an Italian grocer or delicatessen might have left over from carving. These scraps should be removed from the soup half way through cooking.

To make soup for four, Carluccio uses just a small onion, two small tomatoes, a can of borlotti beans. basil and any of the following vegetables to weigh in total 1.5kg:

carrots, celery, courgettes, cauliflower, potatoes, fresh peas, beetroot, garlic, leeks, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, marrows.

Of course, he also serves it with Parmesan cheese on the side.