Chop some cabbage and let fry in 2 tablespoonfuls of butter; add ½ cup of rice (dry) and 1 clove of garlic chopped with ½ small onion. Let fry a few minutes; then add 2 quarts of soup-stock seasoned with salt, white pepper and a little saffron to taste. Add ½ cup of grated Parmesan cheese; let all cook until done. Serve with toasted croutons.
A rice-and-cabbage soup of the sort found all over northern Italy, thickened by the starch of the rice and finished with cheese. The recipe assumes you already have stock; everything else is quick.
- CabbageUse about half a small green or Savoy cabbage, cored and shredded fine — roughly 4 cups loosely packed. Savoy breaks down more gently and suits the soup better than a dense white head.
- RiceHalf a cup of raw short- or medium-grain rice (arborio, carnaroli, vialone nano) is right. It will swell to several times its volume and thicken the broth; long-grain rice will stay separate and give a thinner result.
- Cook until doneThat means 16-20 minutes at a bare simmer, until the rice is tender but not collapsed. Stir now and then, since rice settles and scorches on the bottom of a pot.
- Add the cheese at the endThe instruction to add the Parmesan before cooking is the one thing worth changing. Grated cheese stirred into a pot that then simmers for twenty minutes will clump and stick; stir it in off the heat once the rice is done, or pass it at the table.
- SaffronA small pinch — 10 to 15 threads — crumbled into a spoonful of the hot stock and added near the end. Saffron loses aroma with long boiling, and "to taste" here easily becomes medicinal if overdone.
- Stock quantityTwo quarts with only half a cup of rice makes a brothy soup. If you want it thick enough to stand a spoon in, as many Italian versions are, cut the stock to about six cups.
- YieldSix to eight servings as a first course, four as a supper. It thickens considerably overnight and will need loosening with more stock when reheated.
- CroutonsCubes of stale bread, tossed in olive oil or butter and toasted until crisp. The recipe specifies no method, temperature or time beyond "toasted."
Rice and cabbage cooked together in broth is a staple of the Po valley and the Alpine north, where rice paddies and cold-weather brassicas share the same ground — Lombard and Piedmontese cooking has dozens of variants, some soupy, some closer to a loose risotto. The saffron here points at the same tradition that produced risotto alla milanese, though in a soup it is more colouring than flavour. Books like this one, which set out to give an American home cook a dish for every day of the year with a different nation attached to each, tended to reduce a whole cuisine to one representative pot; "Italian Soup" without further qualification is exactly that kind of shorthand.