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Minestrone
(Italy.) Chop 2 ounces bacon; add a slice of ham, a cabbage, shredded, 2 cups of string beans, 4 tablespoonfuls of celery cut into dice, as much peas, asparagus tips, and a cup of stewed tomatoes. Then add 2 quarts of broth, 1 pound of rice, and some sliced Bologna sausage. Cook for 1 hour; add a cup of grated Parmesan cheese and serve hot. This is a national dish.
A compressed, rather grand version of minestrone that reads more like a note taken abroad than a tested formula. Two things need fixing before it will work: the rice is wildly out of proportion, and the vegetables all go in at once.
- Cut the rice hardA pound of rice (about 2 1/3 cups dry) will absorb nearly all of 2 quarts of broth and swell into a solid mass. Use 1/2 to 3/4 cup of rice for this quantity of liquid, or expect to add another quart or two of broth as it cooks.
- Stagger the vegetablesAn hour will reduce peas and asparagus tips to grey threads. Start the bacon, ham, cabbage and beans; add tomatoes and rice for the last 20 minutes; add peas and asparagus in the final 5.
- Bologna sausageIn cookbooks of this period the term may have covered a larger, coarser cured sausage than the sliced American bologna of today; if so, mortadella or a good salami is the closer substitute. Add it near the end so it does not go leathery.
- "A cabbage"Take this as a small head, roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb, shredded. Savoy is often used and holds up better than a dense white cabbage.
- BrothThe original assumes a household stockpot. Any decent unsalted or lightly salted chicken or beef stock works; the bacon, ham and sausage all contribute salt, so season only at the end.
- The cheese goes in off the heatA cup of grated Parmesan stirred into simmering soup will string and clump. Pull the pan off the heat first, or better, pass the cheese at the table.
- YieldAs written, with the rice corrected, this feeds 8 to 10 as a first course. It thickens considerably overnight and will need thinning with more broth.
Minestrone is simply the augmented form of the Italian minestra, a soup course; the -one suffix marks it as the big one, thick with whatever vegetables the season and the garden yielded. There has never been a canonical recipe, which is precisely why turn-of-the-century travel cookbooks like this one could print a single version and call it "a national dish" without contradiction: in Liguria it carries basil and pesto, in Milan rice and pork fat, in Tuscany beans and stale bread. The rice here, rather than pasta, points at a northern model, as does the bacon-and-ham base standing in for pancetta and a prosciutto end.