Minestra Maritata

It's Cold!
We dropped to the 30s last night. Again. I'm not entirely sure I approve of sub-70 temperature before December. I think we're on the downhill slide to winter, up here on the steppes. The leaves are just starting to turn.

Cold weather, however, affords us an excuse to make more soup. I love making soup.

Standing over a huge dutch oven, stirring a bubbling liquid mass of random ingredients, makes me feel like a wizard or something. It has this Norse Mead Hall sort of aesthetic. Soups feel ancient and exotic, these gurgling, steaming artifacts from our most distant past.

Archeaologists have found evidence of soup-making dating to 8 thousand years ago. Around that time, the Egyptians figured out agriculture, the Chinese started eating rice, some Persians invented wine, and the people of Catal Huyuk, the oldest known city, started baking the first bricks.

That's Old!
Some soup experts think soup started sometime after advances in pottery allowed for boiling without breaking. Others point to evidence of animal hides and hot rocks used for pre-pottery stewing. People originally used boiling water to soften beans and grains and roots. Soup just naturally developed from there. Many ancient cultures subsisted entirely on soup. The sophisticated Spartans (who invented a government of checks and balances divided among various branches like you see in our Constitution) ate this black gruel that few from outside of the Peloponnese could smell without retching. The people of interior Turkey, which was sort of like the Arkansas of the ancient world, lived on goat and grain stews. These people, you know them as the Galatians, left thousands of years of soup cooking artifacts for archaeologists to find.

But no spoons. While soup eating appears more or less consistently across history, spoon usage is spotty. Most people used bread. In fact, the origin of the English word soup comes from the French soupe, meaning "broth", which comes from the Latin suppa, meaning "bread soaked in broth". Suppa also gives us the word sop, which preserves the original meaning a bit more accurately.

Grilled meats and starch dishes don't feel fundamentally different from culture to culture. Soups, though, convey as much information about a culture or region as literature. It tells you about the people, the land, the climate. Soups are the most distinctive regional dish. Think of the difference between Texas Chili, New England Clam Chowder, and Cajun Gumbo. Think of the difference between Chinese Wonton Soup, Spanish Gazpacho, and Middle Eastern Lentil Soup (Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of lentil soup).

So, what regional soppable did I brew last night? Italian Wedding Soup. The Spanish brought with them an early form of this when they conquered Italy in the 1500s. The Italians thought the meat and greens went together so well, they called it minestra maritata, literally "married soup". They intended this as a nod to the compatability of the ingredients, not as a proposed dish for nuptial feasts. The translation into English got confused and then stuck. On the southwestern coast of Italy, this remains a sort of Christmas season dish.

Apologia!
I first came into contact with the Italian Wedding Soup Phenomenon during my food service days. I've thought of it often, but didn't decide to try my hand at it until recently. I found a  recipe in the recipe drawer that came from Cooks.com and it was more or less shenanigans, as are many online recipes (as were other versions of this soup I found online). So I took the backbone of it, threw in some stuff I remembered from the old days, and sort of created my own monster.

Meatballs!
I took the recipe for the meatballs exactly from the cooks.com recipe:

1/2 lb ground beef
2 tsp dried parsley
1/4 cup grated parmesan cheese
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp chopped garlic
1/4 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp basil
1/4 cup milk

Ok, I actually multiplied all of those by 3 when I made it and mixed them all together in a bowl, like meatloaf. Then I rolled it into ping pong sized balls. I brought a pot of salted water to a boil, dropped in the meatballs, and let them boil for 10 minutes.

C'est Soupe!
Then I threw the meatballs in a pot with this stuff:

1.5 cups uncooked orzo
1 onion quartered
2 tsp chopped garlic
2 bay leaves
2 chopped carrots
2 chopped celery stalks
1 tsp oregano
pepper/salt/chili powder to taste
8 cups chicken broth
1 head escarole (you can substitute cabbage or spinach)

Ok, so the reprobates at Cooks.com thought it a good idea to introduce new ingredients mid-instruction-paragraph instead of listing them all at the top, so I missed the escarole when writing up a grocery list. Since you have to have greens, meatballs, and chicken broth as the three tripod legs of a legitimate Italian Wedding Soup, maybe mine was a lie. I'll add the escarole next time I make it.

I brought that delectable mosaic to a boil, cut the heat, and simmered it for 10 minutes. Then we ate it with bread like the Galatians would have done.

Here's what it looked like:

Pretty tasty. Aine and I give it four thumbs up.