Minestrone

Minestrone has no canonical ingredients. Every region and every household makes it from what is in the garden, and the versions differ so widely that arguing about the contents is pointless.

What does not vary is the method: a soffritto, then the vegetables in order of how long they take, then beans, then pasta or rice last. Get the order right and almost any combination works. Get it wrong and everything arrives either raw or dissolved.

Ingredients

Serves 6. Treat the vegetable list as an example rather than a rule.

	Metric	Imperial
Onion, carrot, celery, diced	100 g each	3.5 oz each
Pancetta, diced, optional	80 g	3 oz
Potato, cubed	200 g	7 oz
Savoy cabbage or cavolo nero, shredded	200 g	7 oz
Courgette, cubed	200 g	7 oz
Green beans, cut short	150 g	5.5 oz
Borlotti or cannellini beans, cooked	300 g	10.5 oz
Passata or 2 fresh tomatoes	200 g	7 oz
Small pasta or rice	150 g	5.5 oz
Olive oil, parmigiano rind, basil

The parmigiano rind is not a garnish. Dropped in with the liquid it gives the broth a savoury depth nothing else provides, and it costs nothing because you were going to throw it away.

Method

1. Soffritto: onion, carrot, celery and pancetta in olive oil, slowly, 15 minutes until sweet and collapsed. As with the ragù, this is the step that decides the flavour and the step people rush.
2. Add the tomato and cook it down two minutes.
3. Add water or light stock to cover generously, and the parmigiano rind.
4. Now the vegetables in order of cooking time: potato and green beans first, 20 minutes. Cabbage next, 15 minutes. Courgette last, 8 minutes.
5. Add the cooked beans. For a thicker soup, crush a ladleful against the side of the pan first.
6. Add the pasta or rice and cook until done, adding water if it drinks too much.
7. Off the heat, basil and a hard thread of raw olive oil. Rest ten minutes.

What goes wrong

Everything is the same texture. All the vegetables went in together. The order is the recipe.

It is watery and tastes of hot water. No soffritto, no rind, or too much liquid. Minestrone should be thick enough that a spoon stands up briefly.

The pasta is bloated the next day. It keeps absorbing. Cook the pasta separately and add it per bowl if you intend to keep it.

It is grey. Overcooked green vegetables. Courgette and cabbage go in late for this reason.

Why it works

Long slow cooking of the soffritto breaks cell walls and releases sugars that brown gently, giving a sweet base that no amount of stock replaces. Staggering the additions means each vegetable is cooked exactly through rather than averaged into the same mush, which is the difference between a minestrone and a pot of boiled vegetables.

At the table

A primo and, on a weekday evening, the entire meal. It is what is eaten when nobody wants to cook twice, and a pot of it covers two or three days.

It is often served lukewarm or at room temperature, particularly in summer, and this startles visitors who expect soup to be hot. It is not carelessness. A minestrone at room temperature tastes of more, because the olive oil poured over at the end is not being cooked off in the bowl.

Bread comes with it, and stale bread goes into it: that is a separate dish in Tuscany called ribollita, which is a minestrone reboiled with bread until it stops being a soup at all.

In Genoa a spoonful of pesto goes in at the table rather than in the pot, which turns it into minestrone alla genovese and is worth doing once.

Parmigiano at the table, always. The rind that went into the pot is fished out and, in most houses, quietly eaten by whoever is doing the cooking.

What an Italian would say

That the parmigiano rind belongs in it. That it is a primo and a full meal, not a starter. That it is often better lukewarm than hot, and in summer eaten at room temperature. And that in Genoa a spoonful of pesto goes in at the end, which turns it into a different and equally correct soup.