Heart-warming zuppe

Italian stews and soups transcend cultural borders

Light a roaring fire, put up your feet and settle down for a long winter ahead. This is the best time of the year to get reacquainted with your kitchen and do some slicing, dicing, sauteeing and simmering for a hearty, soul-warming pot of soup or stew.
Both soups and stews are dishes that transcend cultural and national boarders. Kitchens from Provence to Majorca and from Palermo to Milan, all claim ownership to their own recipes.
Within Italy itself there are many different recipes for zuppa or stufato, depending on the cook that makes it, yet they all share some regional similarities. The soups and stews of the northern regions are typically hearty, beef-based stock foundations that help the Northerners sustain the colder temperatures while the southern climates are usually lighter in style, typically based on tomato or vegetable broth.
In the Aosta Valley where the Alpine winters are long and cold, a nourishing hot soup is the local custom. They make a bread soup with cheese that is cooked slowly in the oven. The simplest version of this dish is Seupette de Cogne. It's simply made of only bread, fontina cheese, butter and stock. All of these are ingredients that could be found in the kitchens of even the poorest mountain farmhouse. If bacon, Savoy cabbage, marjoram and savory is added, it becomes almost a luxury version of all bread soups called Zuppa di Valpelline.
Whatever the liquid, the treatment of the vegetables is often the same. They are sautéed or oven roasted to bring out their best flavours and caramelize their sugars. Only after this is the liquid added and the process of slow simmering concentrates the flavours as the meat renders its fat and the liquids reduce. It all contributes to the gradual build up or layering of various flavours.
Because the meat is allowed to cook for hours, less expensive, tougher cuts of beef work best. Cuts from the shoulder, legs and rump are well muscled and the process of slow cooking breaks down the difficult connective tissue and renders it sweet and tender.
Legumes, beans and grains are often times a star ingredient in a soup. In Umbria, the famous lenticchie di Castelluccio, the most sought after lentils in all of Italy, grow on the high plain of Castelluccio. Here they make a lentil stew with sausages, flavoured with bacon and tomato sauce called Lenticchie di Castelluccio con Salsicce.
The main barley growing regions in Italy are Alto Adige and Friuli. During the long winter months, the mountain dwellers often added pearl barley, in a local dish called Tirolean. Likewise the Calabrians grow lima and white beans that are used in winter soups. In this region they preferred mild accompaniments such as tomatoes, celeriac and lots of olive oil in a wonderful bean stew called Minestrone Di Fagioli, Cavolo e Patate (minestrone made from beans, cabbage and potatoes).
As we've all experienced, soup and stew is often better the next day and better yet, the day after that. In the Tuscan countryside, it was the custom to keep a pot of Ribollita on the stove for a few days. Ribollita, which means "cooked for a second time" or "reheated" is named because the flavours became much better the second day. While bacon and ham bones are added to Ribollita, Acquacotta maremmana is a strictly vegetarian version of this soup. Its name, meaning boiled water, is perhaps a reference to the fact that it is thin, or to the absence of meat.
Pesto being one of Genoa's most famous specialties, when added to soup is called Minestrone alla Genovese. This spicy green paste of basil, olive oil, garlic, pine nuts and cheese add the flavours of summer to a warming winter soup.
A bit of leftover meat stew is delicious spooned over tagliatelle for a quick pasta sauce or you can puree it and use it to stuff ravioli. In Liguria, this ravioli filling is called stracotto which means "overcooked" and refers to the time it takes for the stew to cook.
One of the greatest things about soup is its versatility and adaptability. Today many of the chefs of Italy are taking the delicious flavours of vegetable soups and pureeing them for a creamier texture and elegant style. With the aide of a blender, the simple vegetable soup from the region of Molise has been reinvented into a cream of zucchini soup, topped with garlic rubbed slices of day old bread. These new reincarnated soups show no signs of their peasant origins as they are made in most modern day Italian kitchens.

Publication Date: 2003-02-02
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=2295