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Milanese Soup
Put into a stewpan a piece of raw ham with one-half pound of chopped bacon and about one and one-half breakfast cupfuls of haricot beans. Wash a savoy cabbage and cut it into fine shreds and put it in with the above ingredients; then pour in three quarts or more of broth and place the stewpan over the fire. Cut up enough celery roots into small pieces to fill a breakfast cup, and after the broth has boiled for ten minutes, put them in with it. Then put in the stewpan one breakfast cupful of beans, an equal amount of green peas and asparagus heads, three-fourths of a pound of unwashed and unbroken rice, two smoked sausages, and one chopped tomato. Move the stewpan to the side of the fire, and allow the contents to simmer until the rice is done. When soft, mix in with the soup a fair quantity of grated Parmesan cheese. Take out the ham and sausage, cut the sausages into small pieces, put them into a soup tureen, pour the soup and vegetables over them and serve, send to the table at the same time a plateful of sippets of toast or croutons of fried bread.
This is a full minestrone in Waldorf dress, built for a large table. The two points that decide whether it works are the dried beans and the rice, both of which the original leaves you to judge.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup and is usually reckoned at roughly 8-10 fl oz, so about a modern measuring cup or a little more. On that basis the haricots come to something like 1 1/2 cups dry, and the celery root, green beans, peas and asparagus about a cup each.
- Soak the haricotsDried white beans dropped straight into broth with only ten minutes' head start will still be chalky when the rice has gone to paste. Soak them overnight and give them an hour of simmering before the rice goes anywhere near the pot.
- The second cupful of beansHaving already called for haricots, the recipe adds "one breakfast cupful of beans" alongside peas and asparagus. In context these are fresh green beans, cut short — the vegetables of the moment, not more dried ones.
- Rice quantityThree-quarters of a pound of rice into three quarts of broth gives a soup thick enough to stand a spoon in, which is authentically Milanese but startling if you expect a broth. Add stock as it swells, or cut the rice to half a pound. "Unwashed and unbroken" is deliberate: the surface starch is what thickens the soup, so do not rinse it.
- Timing the vegetablesPeas and asparagus heads held for the full twenty-odd minutes the rice needs will turn grey and stringy. Add them in the last five minutes and the soup keeps its colour.
- Raw ham and smoked sausage"Raw ham" here means an uncooked cured piece — a ham hock or a chunk of prosciutto end serves the purpose. For the smoked sausages use something firm and coarse, cotechino or a good garlicky kielbasa rather than a soft breakfast link, since they simmer for a long time.
- Cheese off the heatStir the Parmesan in after the pot has come off the fire. Held at a boil it strings and settles into a rubbery mass at the bottom.
- SippetsSippets are small triangles or fingers of toast, cut to be dipped. Served on a separate plate, as directed, rather than floated on top.
- YieldThree quarts of broth plus a pound and a half of beans and rice makes ten to twelve generous servings. It thickens overnight into something closer to a stew and wants thinning with stock when reheated.
This is minestrone alla milanese under a French-service name, and the giveaways are all there: rice rather than pasta, savoy cabbage, pork fat, and Parmesan stirred in at the end. Rice-based minestrone belongs to Lombardy and the Po valley, where paddy rice has been grown since the later fifteenth century and where a soup thickened with rice is the everyday form. The Waldorf, where Oscar Tschirky was ma"itre d'hôtel, cooked in the international hotel idiom of the 1890s, in which regional Italian dishes entered the repertoire renamed after their city — Milanese, Genoese, Neapolitan — and were standardised into something a brigade could turn out in quantity. The instruction to move the stewpan to the side of the fire points to a range whose top plate had hotter and cooler areas.