I’m almost afraid to say I like cooking Italian. The neighborhood has such a large Italian community that I fear anything I tell people I make will be dismissed by Italian-Americans as not Italian, or maybe not Italian enough.
However, Italian food is very regional, and if Americans are accustomed to the tomato-heavy, pasta-oriented dishes of southern Italy, there’s a lot more to the peninsula. Like Tuscan food.
Tuscany is on the northern end of central Italy, more or less staring west at Corsica. As I understand, the northern parts of Italy are more likely to feature ingredients you’d find in the rest of Europe.
What I like about this dish is that it features kale. Kale is easy to grow — and taking over my garden. It’s nutritious and keeps its texture when it’s cooked, unlike more tender greens such as spinach and escarole. It even has more texture than cabbage, to which it’s botanically related.
Kale is a joke among many cooks because it’s one of those nouveaux-healthy foods, tossed willy-nilly into dishes without thought to what it actually does well.
What kale does well is slow, wet cooking methods — braises and soups. It can stand the heat for a long time without dissolving into a green slurry you can suck up with a straw. Unlike many brassicas, such as cabbage, it doesn’t get bitter or give off a nasty sulfur smell when you cook it. In fact, you can treat it much like collards.
I’ve swapped kale for escarole in escarole soup, otherwise known as Italian wedding soup. But it’s an original ingredient in this Zuppa Toscana.
The soup itself is, like many peasant dishes in cuisines across the world, is more an idea than a specific recipe. Its core ingredients, besides kale, are cannellini beans and potatoes. No meat is required, although it’s a great addition and I use both sausage and bacon. (Oooh, pancetta, maybe?) It’s become popular in America as a dish served at a large chain Italian restaurant, but its most traditional versions actually feature a healthy amount of stale bread, minestra di pane.
I don’t recall where I got the basis for the recipe, but it’s a great late summer or fall dish, when the potatoes are fresh from the garden, and the kale is plentiful.
And my wife has been pestering to make something with all the kale in the garden.
ZUPPA TOSCANA
1 quart chicken stock
1 pound sausage (smoked, if possible), broken up or cut into half-inch slices
1 1/2 cups cannellini beans
2 large or 4 medium potatoes, diced. (Red potatoes work well here)
1 or 2 large carrots, diced
1 cup chopped onion
6 slices thin-sliced bacon
1 crushed hot pepper
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 Tbs. snipped fresh rosemary, or 2 tsp. dried and crushed
2-3 cups kale, washed, ribs removed and chopped
1/2 cup heavy cream
Dry white wine, if desired.
Brown bacon, sausage and onion in a saucepan until the onion is clear, the bacon crispy and the sausage cooked.
Remove bacon and drain excess fat. Add garlic, and pepper and sauté about one minute. Deglaze the pan with wine, if desired. Add rosemary.
Add stock, potatoes and beans and simmer 15-20 minutes. Crumble bacon and return to pan, add kale and cream and simmer five minutes. Serve.
Play with it: This uses rosemary, but try basil or marjoram, instead. Substitute pancetta — Italian bacon — for the American-style bacon. You can add a tablespoon or two of flour to the fat as you saute the garlic and pepper to thicken the broth. Or toss in whatever’s plentiful in the garden, say zucchini, more carrots or mushroom. A quarter-cup or so of Parmesan or Romano cheese punches it up, a bit, too. You can be even more Italian, and add 3 cups of stale bread cubes just before you start it simmering — although extend the simmer time to about 45 minutes. It’s soup: Do what you like.
