Pavese Soup
(Zuppa alla Pavese) Cut as many thin slices of bread as are needed in order that each person may have at least two of them. These slices are then to be toasted and browned with butter. Poach two eggs for each person, one on each slice of bread and place the slices on a large and deep dish (not in a soup tureen). Pour hot broth in the plate, taking care not to break the eggs, season with Parmesan or Swiss cheese, and serve.
A soup that is really an assembly job: the broth is the cooking medium, so everything depends on its heat and its flavour.
- The hinge: broth temperatureThe broth must go in piping hot and the serving dish should be pre-warmed. Note that the recipe poaches the eggs beforehand, so the broth is not doing the cooking.
- "Poach two eggs... one on each slice"The recipe reads as poaching the eggs and setting one on each toast. The classic Pavia version instead slips raw eggs onto the toasts in the dish and pours boiling broth around them; the wording here does not make clear which was meant.
- Yolk donenessPoured broth cooks the white and leaves the yolk fluid, which is the point of the dish. Anyone avoiding undercooked egg — pregnancy, immune compromise, very young or old eaters — should poach the eggs fully in the pan instead, or use pasteurised shell eggs.
- The brothWhat is meant is a real meat brodo, skimmed and clear. A good chicken or beef stock works; a stock cube will taste thin here because there is nothing else in the bowl to hide behind.
- The breadStale, close-crumbed country bread, cut thin as the recipe specifies. Sandwich bread disintegrates. Toast it, then brown it in butter — the browning is what keeps it from turning to paste under the broth.
- "Swiss cheese"In this period the phrase means Gruyère or Emmental, not the sliced sandwich cheese sold under that name in the United States. Grate it finely; a coarse grate will not melt in the time the soup takes to reach the table.
- VesselThe instruction against a tureen is deliberate. The recipe calls for a large, deep dish, warmed, so each portion can be built and carried without the eggs sliding or breaking.
- YieldTwo slices and two eggs per person. The recipe gives no fixed yield and no broth quantity, so scale by the number of eaters.
Zuppa alla Pavese belongs to Pavia in Lombardy, and the story usually attached to it — that it was improvised by a farmwife for Francis I of France after his defeat at the Battle of Pavia in 1525, who wanted her bread-and-broth peasant soup enriched with eggs and cheese — is legend rather than documented history. What is documented is the type: a zuppa in the older Italian sense is broth poured over bread, quite distinct from a minestra, and the form is frugal cooking dressed up by one expensive element, here the eggs and grated cheese. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book (1919) was aimed at American households learning Italian cooking, and this recipe suits that purpose exactly: it demands almost no technique but assumes the reader keeps good broth on hand, which was the real lesson being taught.