Hot Soup for Cold Days

The other day I went to toss a package of rolls into the freezer, and, lo and behold, when I opened the freezer door I found a gift. The best kind of gift. A container of homemade broth.

With the holiday craze and a looming book deadline for which I’ve been testing recipes fast and furiously, I had forgotten all about it. This somehow made it an even better gift. And when, right around the time I made my discovery, snow flurries started to fill the air, well then, there was only one thing to do.

Stop testing (if only for a moment, dear publisher) and start making soup.

When you have homemade broth, you don’t want to make just any old soup. You want to make a soup that will shine a light on that broth. After all, you took the time to make it from scratch. The broth I had made was a classic Italian meat broth, brodo di carne, as it is known. It is, in essence, chicken broth enriched by the addition of beef marrow bones. It is a shade lighter in flavor than beef broth, but a little more robust than plain chicken broth. Italians use brodo di carne in all sorts of ways beyond soup—for simmering stews and moistening roasts, for cooking risotto, and for adding depth to pasta sauces and to sautéed vegetables.

All good uses, but like I said, if you took the time to make broth from scratch (which, apparently, I had), then why not let that broth be the star?

Love the mutton chops!

So I made Gnocchi di Semolina in Brodo di Carne (semolina gnocchi in homemade meat broth). It is an appealing, old-fashioned soup, best eaten hot on a cold day. My recipe, from my first book, is based on one by Pellegrino Artusi, one of Italy’s most revered cookbook authors. His famous collection of recipes, La sienza in cucina e l’arte di mangiar bene (Science In the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well), first published in 1891, is still considered a culinary bible by millions of Italian home cooks, including my mom. A fine English translation by Kyle M. Phillips III, was published by Random House in 1996.

Incidentally, I love Artusi’s book not only for the recipes, so many of which endure to this day, but also for the window it provides into life in Italy in the first decades after unification, and for Artusi’s often barbed (but funny) commentary, especially on cultures beyond his native Emilia Romagna and sometimes on humanity in general. Here are a couple of examples as translated by Phillips:

From a headnote accompanying a recipe for peas with prosciutto: “Let’s leave the pleasure of eating boiled greens either unseasoned or at the most dotted with a little butter to the English; we Mediterranean peoples require that the flavor of our foods be quite stimulating.”

From a headnote accompanying a recipe for meatballs: “This is a dish that everybody knows how to make, including absolute donkeys. Indeed, it was probably the donkey who first suggested the basic shape of the meatball to humans.”

Zing!

But back to the soup which, unlike Artusi’s observations, is gentle in nature. The ‘gnocchi’ in this soup are not the little doughy potato nuggets that most of us think of when we see that word. These are entirely different, made from a batter of semolina flour and eggs that is baked into a thin ‘cake’ of sorts and then cut into small dice. The cubes of semolina, delicately flavored with nutmeg and Parmigiano cheese, are then simmered in the broth, which they soak up like like tiny sponges.

This soup holds all of those magical qualities that any good soup holds. It is simple, nourishing, and uplifting, and it will bolster you against winter’s worst, from the driving snow to wind-whipped rain, and maybe even against verbal assaults, in the unlikely event that any are slung in your direction.

Tagged as: comfort food, Italian cooking, soup, The Glorious Soups and Stews of Italy