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Ministra, Piedmontaise
Cut in very small square pieces one small red carrot, one small turnip, one onion, two leeks and two branches of celery (white part), place in a saucepan with a half ounce butter, set on the fire and brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with two and a half quarts water, add a pound shin of beef and a pound veal bones, season with a tablespoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and a saltspoon Italian saffron. Cover the pan, let gently boil for thirty-five minutes, and add one ounce raw rice and two ounces raw macaroni cut into half-inch pieces. Boil again for twenty minutes, then add two peeled and crushed, fresh red tomatoes and boil for twenty minutes. Remove, take out the beef and veal bones, cut quarter of the beef into same shape as the vegetables and add it to the soup with a teaspoon freshly chopped parsley. Mix a little, skim the fat from the surface, pour into a soup tureen and send to the table with a little grated Parmesan cheese separately.
A clear vegetable-and-bone broth thickened with rice and macaroni, in the style of the Piedmontese minestra. Two things in the original need rethinking: the beef will not be tender in the time given, and the pasta will be well past done.
- The beef is the hingeShin is collagen-rich muscle that needs roughly two hours of gentle simmering to become sliceable rather than stringy. The recipe's 75 minutes of total boiling is short; give the shin and veal bones a good 90 minutes to two hours in the broth before the rice and pasta go in.
- Pasta timingAs written, the macaroni boils for 40 minutes and the rice for 40 as well. Add the rice about 18 minutes before serving and the cut macaroni about 10, so both finish with some bite. Overcooked short pasta will also cloud and thicken the broth.
- A saltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. For saffron that is a great deal by modern standards and by modern prices; a generous pinch of threads, crumbled and steeped in a little hot broth, gives plenty of colour and perfume in 2.5 quarts of liquid.
- SaltA tablespoon of salt in 2.5 quarts is around 0.75 percent, which is seasoned soup rather than over-salted, but the broth reduces as it cooks (more so if you extend the simmer as suggested above) and the Parmesan at the table adds more. Start with two teaspoons and correct at the end.
- Shin of beefAsk for beef shank, bone-in or boneless; the same cut sold for osso buco works. Veal bones are a butcher's order in most places now, and marrow or knuckle bones are the useful sort.
- DegreasingSkimming the surface with a spoon takes off only part of the fat. If you can make the broth a day ahead, chill it and lift the solidified fat off in a sheet, then reheat and add rice, pasta and tomatoes.
- TomatoesTwo fresh red tomatoes, peeled and crushed, means roughly a cup of pulp. Out of season, a cup of drained canned tomatoes crushed by hand is closer to what the recipe assumes than a pale supermarket tomato.
- Yield and the leftover beefThis makes about six generous bowls. Only a quarter of the cooked shin goes into the soup; the rest is good sliced with salsa verde or mustard.
Minestra is the Italian word for a soup served as the first course, distinct from a thin brodo and from the thicker, vegetable-heavy minestrone. What marks this one as Piedmontese in the compiler's mind is presumably the saffron, which in northern Italy is associated above all with Milanese cooking, and the pairing of rice with pasta in the same pot. The soffritto of carrot, turnip, onion, leek and celery browned in butter rather than oil is likewise northern; butter was a common everyday fat of the sub-Alpine kitchen. The recipe's precise weights and minute-by-minute timings read as professional kitchen practice.