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Vegetable Soup (Zuppa alla Primaverile)
Take some cabbage, carrots, celery, onions, turnips, lettuce, squash, potatoes, beans, and peas. Chop each into very small pieces, wash and drain. Take a saucepan, put in a heaping tablespoon of butter; chop up another small piece of onion and add to butter and fry until onion is golden; then add all the vegetables, salt, and pepper, and cover the saucepan. When the vegetables are half cooked, and their juice has become absorbed, dissolve one tablespoon of tomato paste in one-third of a cup of hot water, and add. Instead of the tomato paste there may be added to the onion, before putting in the vegetables, one tomato, peeled and cut into small pieces. When the tomato is cooked add the vegetables. Then add water, a little at a time, until you have sufficient quantity for two persons. Take a slice of bread and cut into small squares or diamonds--toast or fry as desired--put these into the soup plates, and pour the soup (without straining) over them.
A spring vegetable soup built on the Italian habit of sweating vegetables in butter before any liquid goes near them. The quantities are left entirely to the cook, which is the point rather than an oversight.
- The hinge: sweat, don't boilThe vegetables go into the covered pan with only butter, salt and pepper, and cook in their own moisture until it has drawn out and reduced away. That stage is where the flavour comes from; adding water early turns the whole thing into a thin boiled-vegetable broth.
- QuantitiesNothing is specified. As a rough guide for two servings, several cups of vegetables cut small, with water added a ladle at a time at the end until the quantity looks right; the recipe leaves it to the cook.
- Cutting orderThe recipe has everything chopped very small and added together. If you prefer, hold back the beans and peas until the last few minutes so they stay green.
- SquashMost likely summer squash or zucchini here, though the recipe does not say. Beans is probably fresh shell or green beans rather than dried, given the short cooking.
- Tomato pasteTomato paste of this period could be conserva, a sun-reduced and heavily salted product, though commercial tinned paste was also available. Modern tube or tin paste is milder; use the tablespoon dissolved in hot water as directed, but taste before adding more salt.
- LettuceNot an error. Lettuce and escarole were used in Italian soups, and shredded leaves collapse to almost nothing. The recipe adds it with the rest of the vegetables.
- The breadThe croutons go into the plate and the soup is poured over them; the recipe allows either toasting or frying. Cut them small so they hold their shape.
- ServingServes two as written. The recipe does not call for grated cheese.
Zuppa alla primaverile — spring-style soup — belongs to the large Italian family of vegetable soups whose ingredient list is really a description of what the garden or the market is giving up at the moment; related dishes go under minestra and minestrone, though the names are used loosely. One detail worth noting is the reliance on conserva di pomodoro, the dark sun-reduced tomato paste that Italian households put up in summer and drew on all year, offered here as the ordinary option with a fresh tomato as the substitute rather than the reverse. The other is butter rather than oil for the initial frying, which is more characteristic of the north than the south. The word zuppa is usually derived from a term for bread soaked in liquid, which fits the instruction to pour the soup over bread without straining.