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Vegetable Chowder
(Minestrone alla Milanese) Cut off the rind of 1/2 lb. salt pork and put it into two quarts of water to boil. Cut off a small slice of the pork and beat it to a paste with two or three sprigs of parsley, a little celery and one kernel of garlic. Add this paste to the pork and water. Slice two carrots, cut the rib out of the leaves of 1/4 medium sized cabbage. Add the carrots, cabbage leaves, other vegetables, seasoning and butter to the soup, and let it boil slowly for 2½ hours. The last 1/2 hour add one small handful of rice for each person.
When the pork is very soft, remove and slice in little ribbons and put it back.
The minestrone is equally good eaten cold. 10
A workable minestrone once you fill in the blanks the original leaves — it never says which "other vegetables," how much butter, or how much seasoning. Read the whole thing before you start and treat the vegetable list as yours to set.
- The trailing "10"Almost certainly a numbering artefact carried over from the book — a recipe or page number — rather than a yield or a timing. Two quarts of water with rice will serve four to six as a first course.
- A kernel of garlicOne clove. The paste of pork fat, parsley, celery and garlic beaten together is a battuto, the standard Italian soup base; a few pulses in a food processor or a rough mince on the board does the same work.
- Salt porkHalf a pound of salt pork in two quarts of water carries most of the seasoning. Taste before adding any salt at the end, and if your pork is very heavily cured, blanch it briefly and discard that water first.
- "Other vegetables"The Milanese version conventionally means potato, zucchini, green beans, tomato and dried or fresh borlotti beans. Dried beans should be soaked and go in at the start; anything tender belongs in the last 30 to 40 minutes.
- The 2½-hour boilThat length suits the pork and dried beans, not sliced carrots and cabbage. Cooked the whole time they collapse to thread. Give the pork and beans the first ninety minutes alone, then add the vegetables — the finished soup should still be soft, but not a purée.
- RiceA small handful per person is roughly two to three tablespoons of raw rice each. Half an hour is long for most rice; Italian short-grain arborio or vialone nano holds up, while long-grain will be mush. Check at twenty minutes.
- Butter and seasoningUnquantified. Two tablespoons of butter is right for this volume, added with the vegetables; black pepper and, if you like, a rind of parmesan dropped in to simmer.
- Serving coldThe instruction is genuine and traditional in Lombardy. Chill it well and expect the rice to keep swelling — thin with a little water or broth before serving, and taste again, since cold food needs more salt.
Minestrone alla milanese is the rice-thickened version of Italy's broadest soup category: minestra means simply a soup of the everyday kind, and minestrone its large, substantial cousin. What separates the Milanese from the Genoese or Neapolitan is rice rather than pasta, a reflection of the paddy fields of the Po valley, where rice has been grown since the fifteenth century. The salt pork and the beaten battuto of fat, parsley, celery and garlic are the older bones of the dish, from a time when a piece of cured pork was the household's standing source of fat and savour. The note that it is equally good cold is not a concession: cold minestrone is standard summer eating in Lombardy.