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Cabbage Soup, Piedmontaise
Cut a small-sized, sound half cabbage in quarters, remove stale leaves and the core, then cut the cabbage in fine julienne strips. Place in a large saucepan with one ounce butter, one and a half teaspoons salt and three saltspoons pepper; mix a little and cook on moderate fire fifteen minutes, or until tender, stirring once in a while, then add three and a half quarts water, half pound raw, lean fresh pork, half pound raw, lean beef and two medium, scraped, peeled raw potatoes. Cover pan and simmer two hours. Lift up the pork and beef, cut in quarter-inch-square pieces and return to the pan. Pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve with two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A plain peasant soup built in two stages: cabbage sweated in butter, then a long simmer with two cuts of meat. Almost nothing here needs modernising beyond the measures and a few assumptions the original leaves unstated.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so three saltspoons is about 3/4 teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive but correct for three and a half quarts of liquid; add half at the start and the rest at the end if you prefer to judge it.
- The cabbage quantity"A small-sized, sound half cabbage" means half of a small head, perhaps 8 to 12 oz once cored and trimmed. Green or Savoy both work; Savoy (verza) is the cabbage most associated with Piedmontese cooking.
- The hinge: sweat the cabbage dry firstThe fifteen minutes in butter before any water goes in is the whole point of the recipe. Keep the heat moderate and the lid off so the cabbage softens and sweetens rather than steams; if it browns hard the soup turns bitter.
- The meat goes in raw and wholeHalf a pound each of lean fresh pork and lean beef simmer as pieces, then come out to be diced and returned. Use shoulder cuts rather than anything lean enough to dry out — pork shoulder and beef chuck or shin hold up over two hours where loin and round go stringy.
- Skim, and mind the reductionSkim -- The recipe says nothing about skimming, but the first fifteen minutes after the water goes in will throw grey foam; take it off. Cover the pan as directed and keep the simmer bare.
- The potatoes are the bodyTwo whole raw potatoes cooked for two hours will collapse and thicken the broth. If you want them to hold their shape as pieces, add them in the last 40 minutes instead, but the soup will be thinner.
- "Fresh pork"This means unsalted, uncured pork, as opposed to salt pork or bacon. Do not substitute pancetta or salt pork without cutting the 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt back sharply.
- YieldRoughly six to eight bowls. The two ounces of Parmesan passed separately is about 3/4 cup grated — enough for a generous spoonful each.
Cabbage, pork and cheese is the standard grammar of cooking in Piedmont and the alpine valleys above it, where cabbage stored through the winter and a pig was killed once a year. Better-known versions from those valleys layer the cabbage with stale bread and Fontina and bake it — zuppa valpellinentze and its relatives — where here the grated cheese is handed round at the table rather than cooked in. The instruction to pull the meat out, dice it and return it is a frugal habit as much as a technique: one piece of pork and one of beef feed a table when they are cut small and suspended in broth. The Parmesan passed separately is not what every Piedmontese cook would have had to hand; a local mountain cheese would have been as likely.