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Minestra, Milanaise
Cut into small dice-shaped pieces one small carrot, one small turnip, one small onion, two leeks and one branch celery. Place them in a saucepan with half ounce butter and gently brown for ten minutes, carefully stirring with a wooden spoon occasionally. Moisten with three quarts water. Season with two teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper, adding half saltspoon powdered saffron. Drop in a good beef bone or chicken bones; cook for forty-five minutes. Now add one ounce uncooked Italian spaghetti in one-and-a-half-inch equal pieces and one ounce raw rice. Boil for twenty minutes. Peel and cut into small dice-shaped pieces a small, sound potato, and a good, red, peeled tomato, cut the same way, and add to the soup. Gently boil twenty-five minutes more. Remove the bones, add one tablespoon finely chopped parsley. Mix well, then serve.
A thin, saffron-tinted vegetable soup in the Milanese manner, built on a bone broth made in the same pot. Two things need attention: the pasta and rice go in far too early, and three quarts of water over a bare bone makes a weak base.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the saffron here is about 1/8 teaspoon of powder " enough to colour three quarts and give the faint metallic sweetness that marks the Milanese style. Powdered saffron loses potency fast; if yours is threads, crush a small pinch and steep it in a spoonful of the hot broth before adding.
- The pasta and rice timingAs written the spaghetti and rice boil for 45 minutes and dissolve. Add the rice about 18 minutes before serving and the broken spaghetti about 10 minutes before, judging by the packet rather than the clock in the text. The soup should be brothy with distinct grains and short lengths of pasta, not a porridge.
- Bones and brothA single beef or chicken bone in three quarts of water for 45 minutes yields very little. Either use two to three pounds of bones and simmer them an hour or more before the pasta goes in, or replace part of the water with a light unsalted stock. Salt at the end in that case, since two teaspoons was calculated against plain water.
- Browning the vegetablesHalf an ounce of butter (one tablespoon) to that quantity of diced vegetables is barely enough to keep them from catching. Keep the heat low; the aim is softening with a little colour, not scorching.
- Small diceCut everything to a uniform quarter-inch. The soup has no purée and no thickening, so the dice is the whole texture of the dish.
- SkimBones raise a grey foam in the first ten minutes of simmering. Lift it off before the pasta goes in or it clouds the broth and dulls the saffron colour.
- YieldAbout three quarts before evaporation " six to eight servings as a first course. One ounce each of pasta and rice is a deliberately light hand; this is a broth with garnish, not a minestrone.
- At the tableGrated Parmesan or grana passed separately is usual with a soup of this kind, though the recipe does not mention it. A little more chopped parsley at the last moment does no harm.
Minestra in Italian simply means soup " the everyday first course, distinct from the thicker, vegetable-crowded minestrone " and the Milanese label here is earned by the saffron, the ingredient that colours the city's best-known dishes, above all risotto alla milanese. Saffron reached Lombardy through the medieval spice trade. International cookbooks of the early twentieth century collected these regional formulas for American cooks who were meeting Italian food through immigration and through hotel dining rooms; the combination of rice and spaghetti in one pot suits a region where rice was long established and dried pasta a later arrival, and neither was used in the quantities a modern bowl expects.