Minestra means soup in Italian. That’s all it means. But for me that vowel driven word—notice all of them but the u are in there—minestra carries alchemical transcendent possibilities. Minestra is a church, a liturgy, an encoded mythic history
“I want Grandma’s ‘nast,” is how my sister’s granddaughter, Rosie said it over and over as soon she was old enough to eat real food.In our modern secular lives, cooking seems to be what we have left of alchemy. Maybe that’s why we prize it so, why our young people have taken up cooking as an art, a sport, a vision. Transforming the raw and the fresh into something we’ll eat is alchemy. It’s a connection to our earliest human origins, when we learned to use fire in order to make things we eat. But this particular food, minestra, this soup that is more than soup: it’s truly full of preternatural powers.Even though one of the things I love about cooking is its playful aspect, for me this one recipe is sacrosanct. I make it one way. Even within family and friends there are variations. Annie Carballo puts in string beans or whatever vegetables are in her fridge. Lucia convinced me to put potatoes in for our vegetarian children to give the minestra, Rosie’s ‘nast, more substance. I make an exception for them. But only for them.My sister, Lucia, has the opposite approach. She sees it all as improvisation. “Cooking is like jazz, you can’t write down every note. Not only does everyone cook it differently—just take our own family—but everyone makes it differently every time they make it. I know it’s true for me. I’m always asking myself, is it better? Is it better to cook the greens in the broth, or separately? Those questions are always alive for me. They are never settled. Do you chop the greens while they are still raw, or after they’re limp and wet? This is one of the pleasures of cooking. To be open to suggestions by the ingredients and the day on which you are cooking it. I’m different every time I make it, and therefore the outcome is different.”Although it’s true that this soup will straighten out your life, soothe your soul, and heal a broken heart, minestra just means soup in Italian. That’s all. But for my family that vowel-driven word—notice all of the vowels are in there except the u—meant transcendent possibilities.When Pretzel, my son’s very young dog, was run over by a speeding car and died on the way to the vet in my son’s arms—my response was to make a vat of minestra. I was certain that the best I had to offer was this soup with its rich layers of broths, meats, and greens. It might help a bit. It would carry with it ingestible comfort.The word minestra comes from the word minster or serve, which suggests that it takes care of those it’s given to eat, and that the minestra maker is a caretaker.It’s a big, layered dish, which needs a goodly amount of time to make, and which my family all cherish and love on a cold winter’s day. There are times when we feel it’s the only thing that can possibly make things better. It can help with grief, healing, exhaustion, sheer misery. We make it when someone comes home from a long journey, physical or psychic. It’s a meal fit for death, divorce, breakups, or other terrible losses. It helps to right the earth’s axis.All cultures and families have such foods. These foods gather family stories, memories of old customs; eating this food often marks certain dramas and occasions. There’s nothing new there. But if each family doesn’t believe that it can have this kind of profound impact, then the dish is not worthy of its reputation. Since this soup is ours, I have complete faith in its unique powers to heal and set things right again.Soup is soothing liquid, meant to slide down with fluidity and ease. There isn’t so much chewing as there is ingesting over deep breaths. Our minestra has a heartiness that partly contradicts its identity as soup, while also being the essence of it. There are the pieces of carrots, celery, onions, and chicken in it. There are the small meatballs and the pieces of pepperoni. All of it embedded in large amounts of cicoria and scarole.The warm mist, which rises up from a just served bowl of this combination gives one a sense of eating healthily, substantially, and delicately all at the same time. There is the soft cloud of a good chicken soup, the delicious meaty vapors of the meatballs and pepperoni, and the flood of scents from the greens, which sooths, repairs, and makes one whole again.The etymology of the word restaurant has, at its root, the word connected to soup. Wikipedia tells us that in sixteenth-century France there was an inexpensive concentrated soup sold by street vendors that was specifically known to help to restore a person against exhaustion, hence, the word restaurant. This in turn led in the eighteenth century to a shop called a restaurant being opened that specialized in those kinds of soups.Perhaps if I describe the way we make it, what I’m talking about will become clearer. There are five distinct parts to this. The soup, the preparations of the two additional meats, and the preparations of the greens. Then the assembly.
The Recipe: My Version
First, make a big chicken soup.I use lots of wings and some backs to make the big broth. I will add some chicken breasts for say the last 45 minutes. My stepdaughter, Donna, buys a beautifully roasted chicken to break up in her chicken soup.The vegetables: onions, carrots, parsley, tomatoes, and only sometimes celery. In my 14-quart stockpot I’ll add to the chicken 4 to 5 onions, 5 or 6 large carrots, at least one full head of Italian parsley, 1 or 2 large cans of peeled tomatoes. Salt and pepper. It all simmers slowly, sometimes overnight. In the morning, heaven. And maybe a cup for breakfast. It’s been known to happen.Strain the broth, keeping aside any vegetables or chicken you choose. I like to keep all the carrots and some of the celery, some of the onions, tomato, and whatever chicken I can save from the pieces. De-fat the broth by skimming or chilling.Next: the pepperoni and meatballs.Buy 2 or 3 sticks of a good-quality pepperoni, and cut them into thick slices, skinned or not. Boil the pieces for a few minutes to tenderize and remove excess fat. This is a kind of sad substitute for all of the home-made pork products my grandmother put into her minestra, ends of prosciutto, dried sausage in oil, a pork rib, or some salt pork.The meatballs.Mix together:-3 lbs. equal parts ground pork and veal– 1 bunch of fresh basil, finely chopped-6‒7 cloves of crushed garlic-Lots of grated Parmigiano cheese-Salt and pepper-4 large eggs, beaten-1 cup of dried bread crumbs-Enough milk or cream to moisten the mixture. Make very small meatballs (about ¾-inch in diameter). Boil them in water, set aside.The greens. At least 2 heads each of cicoria and scarole (chicory and escarole) carefully washed and rinsed to remove all of the sand and dirt off these wonderful greens. Break off all browned edges, or any parts that aren’t fresh. The centers are so tender you might want to put them aside for salad. Fill huge bowls with cold water and gently swish your greens around, 1 head at a time, then drain them in a (scolamacaron’) colander. Rinse and repeat until there’s not a bit of sand or dirt at the bottom of the bowl. As each head is cleaned, steam it in a large pan with some water. Cut these large leaves into pieces and set aside. Steam the next head. You get into a rhythm. The greens are a major reason why this soup is so delicious, and makes us feel so good when we eat it. You can cheat and use frozen greens but the cooking gods will know, and you just won’t be as good or as healthy a person ever again.The assembly. Add the greens to the meatballs, pepperoni, vegetables, and chicken pieces in the broth. Cook until the elements are married. Taste for salt and pepper.All of the food that I learned to cook in my mother’s kitchen, my grandmother’s kitchen, my aunts’ kitchens seemed immutable, forever exactly the same. But one of the most important recipes in my family tells another story, that is the minestra made on the farm every Monday.
Minestra, Monday Midday Dinner Up the Farm
My cousin, Bede Becce Avcollie, the firstborn of my Aunt Bea and Uncle Rocco, grew up on the farm, where the oldest ways of cooking in all of our families went on the longest, because it was a pig farm and they had a huge kitchen garden. They made their own prosciutto, sausage, capicola. They canned tomatoes, pears, lots of other things too, and made their own cheese. My grandmother was the originator of all of this cooking; even while she reviled her daughter-in-law, my Aunt Bea, mercilessly because she wasn’t Italian and married her only surviving son, Grandma still taught Aunt Bea, her daughter-in-law, all of her cooking ways. She learned every detail, and carried all of these traditions on for all of us. My cousin Bede knows the original recipe.Bede recalls how they made the minestra every Monday for dinner.“First my mother started with a large soup pan on the stove. Then she added salt pork or a few ribs. Sometimes she used the end of the prosciutto or some dried sausage. Sometimes some salt pork or ribs. Whatever we had in the house. Mostly she made a chicken stock, with pieces of chicken, like the backs and necks, but she sometimes made a beef stock, using soup bones. After that simmered a while, she added whole onions, carrots, celery, and a few sprigs of parsley. We always added greens from the garden, scarole, cicoria. But dandelions were the essential green that had to be in the soup. We picked those from the fields around the house where they grew wild. The greens were cooked separately and added to the broth at the end. When freezers came in, my mother would freeze some too. She put some chicken in at the end so it wouldn’t be overcooked. We never put meatballs in our minestra.“She removed all of the parsley. She took the vegetables out whole and served those in one serving dish. She put all of the meat in another serving dish. We had the minestra first as our soup. Then we grated our own cheese on top of it: mozzarella and parmesan. We’d have that with fresh Italian bread, and dip the bread in the soup. Then we each had some vegetables and whatever pieces of meat we wanted after the soup.”
Another Important Story about Soup: The Benediction
by Lucia Clapps Mudd, about our Aunt Dora LaGuardia Claps
Aunt Dora was a dumpling of an aunt. She spoke in hems and haws. With hands overlapping on her belly, she sputtered in fits and starts. “Ummh, huh, ehhe.” Reticent and unsure with words, she was right as rain in the kitchen; silky homemade pasta, sugary eggy tarall’s, minestra—and what a minestra!
Uncle Paul was Dad’s beloved uncle, a superb storyteller, and Aunt Dora was Uncle Paul’s beloved wife.Yet it came to pass that one of the favorite stories to come out of the two-family house on Oak Street was Aunt Dora’s to tell.
It seems that Uncle Paul’s sister, Aunt Sadie, was not well and Aunt Dora went to New York, to Maspeth, to take care of her. Aunt Sadie was sweet and mild with a large rosy dot on each cheek and soft curly hair. Her husband, Uncle John, was a fine tailor but a mean man. From his Fifth Avenue shop he dressed New York’s finest—celebrities and movie stars, Cary Grant and Adolph Menjou. But he couldn’t stitch together a kind word.
Aunt Dora ministered to Sadie with true devotion. She hurried about the fine house in Maspeth, cooking and cleaning and tending to Sadie. When Uncle John came home from Fifth Avenue he’d start criticizing. He liked everything done the way his mother had done it: His mother was from Vetri. He belittled and berated Sadie, even in her sick bed, finding fault, and finding it with pleasure. This really steamed the loyal and devoted sister-in-law.
This particular day, Aunt Dora set about to make her minestra, a complex task. She peeled and chopped, and simmered and stammered, “Humm, ehhh, uhhh,” runzeling along with the low boil of the pots.
When Uncle John came home he started right in with his taunting. “My mother used l’oss ’d’ maial’. Where’s l’oss ’d’ maial’?”
“Ahhh, huh, oh, you want the pork bone! Okay, then I’ll give you the bone.” So she reaches in and pulls the precious prosciutto bone out of the soup; brass knob coming out of the holy water. Then nice and wet and dripping she delivers it directly to Uncle John’s head! Botta bang! “Oiyy!,” She covers her mouth with her hands as she recalls the contact.
“Ummh, ehhe,” she continues, “and then the lump came.”We laugh out loud. We applaud her. “Well done, Aunt Dora, well done!”
A benediction, a long time coming. “Huuh, umu, huuh,” the priestess incants, remembering. And we praise and honor her.
Speaking of Minestra, or The Last Soup Song
by Bill Herman
When I was a little kid—under eight years of age—my family lived on the top floor of a two-story house, whose bottom apartment was occupied by the Campanellas. We Jews referred to them fondly as the ’talieners . The neighborhood was mixed: Jews, Italians, Irish, without exception working-class people. I was crazy about the Campanella girls, Josephine and Anna, they seemed so abundant, so pretty.
So once in a while I was in their apartment, and there, every time, I noticed an alien smell—I knew it as “Italian.” I had experienced any number of Jewish homesteads and they smelled—like each other. Like mine—more or less garlicky, more or less of boiled chicken or of a recent scouring with Ajax (“the foaming cleanser”). But the Campanellas’ house: sharply different, in another class altogether. Finally, one day, I began to associate it with dark, dark greens, cooking and cooked greens, though I never actually saw any. I said to myself, well, they eat different stuff. I decided I wouldn’t really like home-cooked Italian food. Too much of that dark green stuff that smelled.
A few years later—I was then forty-seven—I was courting this great beauty of an Italian American woman from a big clan in Waterbury, Connecticut (notice I’ve switched from just plain Italian). The courtship was dessert for me, a very rich, very surprising encounter with varieties of thrilling sweetness—and yet I was wary. Things were going too well. Like all DNA-fortified males, I was blood-bound to resist commitment. I did. I faltered.
Among the things Jo did to overcome this powerful force was to ask her adviser, Lenny Kriegel, and his wife, along with members of an entire seminar that she attended, to an Italian dinner, together with me, her boyfriend, in her apartment. This enterprise struck me as daring to the point of recklessness: her apartment was a postage stamp—a one-room studio, no “L,” and so small that she slept on a trundle bed that doubled as a couch. There was one armchair, a couple of small tables, and a kitchen that was a begrudging indentation in one wall. Of course, no dishwasher and a pint-sized fridge.
I ventured a little skepticism, which she waved aside with all the jaunty daredevil-confidence of the guy who walked across a rope from one world trade tower to the other. Since in her seminar there had been considerable serious talk about ethnicity and Jo being Italian, Lenny had told Jo—not asked—that he wanted an Italian dinner. At this charge, too, she smiled adorably with superconfidence and calm as a bed sheet, and said “Sure.”
To me, she just said: “Make sure everybody shows up.”
On the appointed night, then, I rounded up the other suspects and appeared at the door of, essentially, what most restaurants would have designated as a cloak room, and as we entered, across the spidery strands of time and memory, there wafted into my nostrils that alien smell, a faint version, of what I had used to smell in the Campanellas’ apartment when I was a kid.
The crowd of us jostled around, miraculously found seats—most on the floor—had a lot of laughs greeting Jo. I asked her what we were gonna eat.
“ Minastr’ ,” she said. “Look in the pot.” There, floating in an enormous quantity of soup (I supposed) were, in addition to things I’d never dreamed could be accommodated in soup, limp waves of green stuff—the source of the aroma, as I now named it, and boy was I even more in love. I was still a little culinary Jewish kid, for whom soup was chicken or split pea. The former, guzzled straight when you were sick, with matzo balls on Passover, or with rice or noodles at Friday night dinner. Split pea was a lunch special—
for variety.
I was even more in love because I knew I was gonna eat all that stuff in the soup: little meatballs! boiled pepperoni! and things I usually consumed in a salad or on a pizza. Could I do it?
Folks, that enormous bowl of minastr’ —covered with a snowy layer of freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, my first ever—gave me a momentary shiver of deracination, but I knew I couldn’t hesitate and I didn’t. Sublime and glorious don’t begin to do it justice. A velvet rush to the taste buds, a strengthening of the sinews, a delayed message to the genitals, and in the end, my entry into the life I would soon commit to. All done in this tiny, but blissful bower of Jo’s. Like being inside the heart of a rose.
That wasn’t all: the second course was lasagna. The forces of male denial were thus overcome, and I can actually make this dish myself now.
