Vegetable Soup
(Zuppa Santè) Any kind of vegetables may be used for this soup: carrots, celery, cabbage, turnips, onions, potatoes, spinach, the outside leaves of lettuce or greens of any variety.
Select three or four kind of vegetables, shred or chop coarsely cabbage or greens, and slice or cut in cubes the root vegetables. Put them over the fire with a small quantity of cooking oil or butter substitute, and let them fry until they have absorbed the fat. Then add broth and cook until the vegetables are very tender. Fry croutons of stale bread in oil and serve them in the soup.
A method rather than a formula: the original gives no quantities, no timing and no yield, which is normal for Italian home soups of this kind. What follows fills in the numbers a modern cook needs.
- ProportionsFigure roughly 6 cups of prepared vegetables to 2 quarts of broth for six servings. The soup should be thick with vegetables, not a clear broth with a few pieces floating in it.
- "Let them fry until they have absorbed the fat"This is the hinge. It means sweating the vegetables over medium-low heat in 3 to 4 tablespoons of fat until they turn glossy and begin to soften, 8 to 10 minutes, without browning. Skipping it gives a thin, watery soup; browning them gives a different, heavier dish.
- Butter substituteA common phrase in American cookbooks of this period, meaning margarine or a vegetable shortening; such products were widely marketed well before the war as well as during it. Use olive oil or butter.
- CuttingThe instruction to shred greens and cube roots is about even cooking, not looks. Keep the root vegetable dice to about half an inch so they finish at the same time as the cabbage.
- Order of the potSpinach and lettuce leaves collapse in two or three minutes and should go in near the end rather than into the initial fry, or they will turn drab and stringy.
- Cooking time"Very tender" is 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer once the broth is in. This is not a crisp-vegetable soup; the point is that everything gives way to a spoon.
- BrothThe recipe does not specify a kind; a household meat brodo is the likely assumption. Any good chicken or beef stock works; with vegetable stock, salt more assertively at the end, since the vegetables themselves contribute little.
- CroutonsCubes of stale bread fried in olive oil until golden, about 3 minutes, drained on paper. Add them at the table, not in the pot, or they dissolve.
Zuppa santé — the name translates as "health soup", after the French soupe or potage à la santé — is applied to the everyday vegetable soup built from whatever the garden or the larder yielded, and its inclusion of "the outside leaves of lettuce or greens of any variety" is the whole spirit of the thing: it is a recipe for using up trimmings that would otherwise be thrown out. Maria Gentile's The Italian Cook Book appeared in 1919, aimed at American households curious about Italian cooking; the fat is given as "cooking oil or butter substitute" rather than butter, which fits both ordinary Italian practice and the food economies of the period. The technique of sweating the vegetables in fat before adding liquid applies the Italian soffritto principle to the whole soup rather than just its aromatic base, and the fried bread served in the bowl reflects the older habit from which the word zuppa is generally held to descend — a soup was originally something poured over a sop of bread.