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Lettuce Soup (Zuppa di Lattuga)
I small lettuce Meat stock 2 potatoes The leaves of a head of celery 2 tablespoons of peas, fresh or canned I heaping tablespoon of flour Put the potatoes, cold boiled, into the stock when it boils, add the celery leaves, the lettuce chopped up, the peas, and the flour mixed well with a little cold stock or water. Boil for one hour and a half, and serve with little squares of fried bread.
A thin, thrifty vegetable soup built on leftovers — cold boiled potatoes, the tough inner leaves of a celery head, a lettuce past its best. The one thing to reconsider is the cooking time.
- No stock quantity givenThe original never says how much meat stock to use. For the vegetables listed, 1.5 quarts (about 1.4 litres) gives a soup of the right consistency; a single heaping tablespoon of flour is a very light thickening in that volume, which is the intent.
- The hour and a halfNinety minutes at a boil will turn the lettuce, peas and celery leaves grey-brown and flatten the flavour. Twenty to thirty minutes at a bare simmer does everything this soup needs; add the peas in the last five minutes if fresh, the last two if canned.
- Potatoes already cooked"Cold boiled" potatoes are leftovers, and they go in only to warm through and break down slightly. If you are boiling them fresh, cook them first and let them cool, or the soup thickens unevenly.
- Celery leavesThe leafy tops from a head of celery, which most modern recipes discard. They carry a strong, slightly bitter celery flavour; the pale inner leaves are milder than the dark outer ones. A handful is right.
- The flourSlaked with cold stock or water before it goes in, which is the whole trick — added dry it will lump. Whisk it into the simmering pot and give it at least ten minutes to lose the raw taste.
- Lettuce choiceA firm cos or butterhead holds up; loose modern salad leaves collapse to nothing. Shred it rather than chop it coarsely.
- The fried breadSmall squares of stale bread fried in butter or oil until golden — croutons. Fry them while the soup finishes and add at the table, not in the pot.
- Seasoning and yieldNo salt or pepper is specified; presumably the stock was expected to carry it, so taste and correct at the end. Serves four as a first course.
Lettuce cooked rather than dressed is far older than the salad habit that now dominates it — Roman and medieval kitchens both boiled and braised it, and it survives in this form across Italy and France in soups and in lattuga ripiena, stuffed lettuce. A soup like this belongs to the cucina povera logic: cold boiled potatoes from yesterday, the celery leaves that would otherwise go in the bin, a lettuce beginning to wilt, and whatever stock the household had going. That canned peas are offered as an alternative suggests commercially canned vegetables were by then common enough in an ordinary kitchen to be named without apology. The fried bread squares are a common Italian finish for a thin soup, doing the work that a fuller broth would otherwise have to do.