Home › Soups › Potato Soup (Zuppa alla Provinciale)
Potato Soup (Zuppa alla Provinciale)
2 large potatoes 3 tablespoons of cream or milk 2 tablespoons of butter 2 yolks of eggs Soup stock Boil the potatoes, then rub them through a sieve. Put them into a saucepan with the butter, a little salt, and the cream or milk. Simmer until it is thick, then add the yolks of the two eggs to form it into a paste. Turn out onto the bread-board, cut into small dice, and throw them into the stock, which must be boiling. If desired, before serving sprinkle a little Parmesan cheese into the soup.
This is a potato-paste dumpling soup rather than a puréed one: the potato is cooked down stiff, bound with yolks, cut into dice and dropped into hot broth. Two points decide whether it works.
- Dry the potatoBoil the potatoes whole in their skins, peel while hot, and rice or sieve them. A waterlogged mash will never firm into a cuttable paste, no matter how long you simmer it. Floury potatoes (russet, Maris Piper) behave far better than waxy ones.
- Yolks off the heatSimmer the sieved potato with butter, salt and cream until it pulls away from the pan as a mass, then take it off the heat before beating in the yolks. Added over direct heat they scramble and the paste turns grainy.
- Let the paste coolSpread it out on the board and let it cool to room temperature, or chill it, before dicing. Warm paste smears under the knife; cold paste cuts into clean quarter-inch dice.
- "Soup stock"The recipe says no more than that; a clear meat or chicken broth is the obvious reading. Something in the region of 1.5 quarts (about 1.4 L) of good stock will suit this quantity; a weak or cloudy broth leaves the dish tasting of nothing but potato.
- Cooking the diceDrop them into stock at a bare boil and give them two to three minutes, until they float and are heated through. A hard rolling boil knocks them apart, and long cooking dissolves them into the broth.
- Cream measuresThree tablespoons of cream or milk is the starting point, not a rule. Adjust so the mixture is stiff enough to hold a shape; potatoes vary more in moisture than the recipe allows for.
- YieldTwo large potatoes and this much stock serve four as a first course. The Parmesan at the end is worth doing, grated fine and added at the table rather than in the pot.
Simple Italian Cookery was written by Antonia Isola (the pen name of Mabel Earl McGinnis) and published in New York in 1912, and is usually counted among the earliest English-language books aimed at cooking Italian food in an American kitchen. The Italian title here, zuppa alla provinciale, means simply "provincial" or country-style soup, and the dish sits close to the potato-and-egg pastes used for gnocchi: much the same enriched mash that would be rolled and boiled as dumplings is here cut into dice and cooked in broth. Frugality is the logic behind it — a couple of potatoes, two yolks and a pot of stock stretch into a course for four — and the Parmesan is offered as an optional finish rather than an assumption.