No. 322

Menestrone Milanese Soup

Potage Menestrone a la Milanaise

Chop up half a pound of fat fresh pork, put it into a saucepan with a clove of garlic, half a pound of raw ham cut in dice, three-sixteenths of an inch square, half a pound of string beans, cut lozenge shape, half a pound of small flageolet beans and half a pound of Kohl sprouts cut in quarter inch squares. Fry all these vegetables with the ham in the chopped up fat pork, moisten with six quarts of broth, boil, skim, then add one pint of green peas, one pound of asparagus tops, and half a pound of broad or lima beans, after removing their outer skins, and also eight medium peeled and quartered tomatoes. Boil the whole, and when these vegetables are nearly done, twenty minutes before serving, add a quarter of a pound of blanched rice. Cook some smoked sausages, by soaking them for ten minutes in boiling water, then lift them out and peel them; cut into slices, and put them into the soup; suppress the clove of garlic, and serve with grated parmesan separate.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's minestrone is built for a hotel kitchen: six quarts of broth and roughly three and a half pounds of vegetables. The method is sound, but the quantities and a few of the ingredient names need translating.

Scale it downAs written this yields about 20 generous servings. Quartering everything gives a 1.5-quart batch that feeds four to six with the rice.
Fat fresh porkThis means unsalted pork back fat or fatback, chopped and rendered as the cooking medium. Diced pancetta or a couple of tablespoons of lard plus a little olive oil will do the same work; if you substitute salt pork, hold back on salting the broth.
Kohl sproutsMost likely Brussels sprouts (cf. German Kohlsprossen), though the term may also cover young cabbage sprouts. Cut into quarter-inch squares as directed, which is to say shredded — whole sprouts will not cook down in the same time.
Flageolet and lima beansThe skinning of the broad or lima beans suggests fresh shelled beans throughout, which cook in the soup in 20 to 30 minutes. Dried flageolets must be soaked and simmered separately until tender before they go in, or they will still be hard when the rice has turned to paste.
Order of additionsAsparagus tops and green peas go soft in under ten minutes. Add them, and the tomatoes, in the last ten to fifteen minutes rather than at the start of the long boil, and treat the recipe's sequence as a list rather than a schedule.
Blanched riceParboil the rice for two or three minutes in salted water, drain, and add it 20 minutes before serving. A short or medium grain such as arborio or carnaroli suits the texture; long grain works but stays looser.
The sausageTen minutes in boiling water is enough to heat a cured, smoked sausage through and loosen its casing — that is what "peel them" means. A raw fresh sausage needs to be cooked properly first.
Suppress the clove of garlicNineteenth-century kitchen English for fish it out and discard it. The whole clove is there to perfume the fat, not to be eaten.
ServingGrated Parmesan on the table, never stirred in during cooking. The soup thickens considerably as it stands; loosen with hot broth when reheating.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico's in New York, published The Epicurean in 1894 as a working encyclopedia of the restaurant's repertoire, and its soup chapter draws on French, Italian, German and American practice. Minestrone is simply the augmentative of the Italian minestra, a soup — a big soup — and the Milanese version is traditionally distinguished by rice rather than pasta, reflecting the rice paddies of Lombardy and Piedmont. Ranhofer keeps the variant spelling menestrone and the French title potage, and frames the dish for a brigade cook who would read "lozenge shape" and "three-sixteenths of an inch square" as ordinary instructions. The vegetable list — string beans, flageolets, peas, asparagus tips, broad beans, tomatoes — marks it as a late-spring or early-summer soup, from a period when a restaurant kitchen's minestrone changed with what the market sent in.