It’s Friday but I’m still doing a Throwback Thursday Cookbook Review. If you follow this blog, it’s been a bad week for cookbook reviews. I’m sorry, but I’ve been distracted. Let me tell you something: you break 39 and the path begins to descend. I’m seeing a physical therapist and it’s a tossup: I hurt going into the session with lower back issues and she works on me and I hurt coming out with soreness from her elbow probing into my glute.
Nothing is simple, I suppose. And consider the alternative: not being around to feel the pain.
Suzi and I miss Anne Bianchi. She’s not around because she lost a very long battle to cancer. She was the kind of person you do not fall in love with instantly. The eyes were too penetrating, she seemed so intelligently intense. No, it took maybe a whole hour and then you were in love and we have stayed in love with her and her memory.
Anne, if I remember correctly, was actually born in Italy and spent her childhood bopping between Tuscany and New York. She finished a Ph.D. in psychology intending to be a therapist. She quickly discovered that her passion for food was the best avenue to help people. So there came the cooking school and wine classes and cooking classes in New York City, and, of course, books From the Tables of Tuscan Women, which I reviewed earlier and this one, Zuppa.
The subtitle of Zuppa is Soups from the Italian Countryside. So what you find here are not restaurant creations but the fare of grandmothers. This book is perhaps the most intensive survey of Italian soups ever constructed [in English, I suppose]. Anne traveled, tasted, researched and developed entire chapters by style of soup:
- Broths
- Vegetable Soups
- Bread Soups, Purees and Cream Soup
- Grain Soup with Rice, Pasta, Polenta and Chestnuts
- Farro Soups
- Lentil and Chickpea
- Bean Soups
- Fish Soups
- Meat Soups
The first recipes here deal with those broths, the essence of great soup and easily a meal iin themselves. Ideas presented include Basic Meat Broth, Basic Chicken Broth, Basic Fish Broth, Basic Vegetable Broth, Mushroom Broth, Clam Broth, and even Creamy Marsala Broth that starts with that basic chicken broth and expands it. Nothing here is outrageous or exceptional. Just perfectly tuned recipes to get you started although that Basic Chicken Broth with a whole chicken, carrots, celery, onion, parsley and basil is probably something you don’t want to miss. Making your chicken broth fresh, from a whole chicken, may just give you a different taste than opening up that can you bought at the supermarket.
Then it’s off to the soup races as recipes gush page after page. Here’s a dozen reasons you want to try this book:
Rice and Dandelion Soup
Wild Herb Soup with Prosciutto and Nutmeg
Cream of Fennel Soup
Grate Pasta Soup [grated Parmigiano-Reggiano with bread crumbs in chicken broth]
Farro and Shellfish Soup
Farro, Sausage and White Wine Minestrone
Lentil Soup with Anchovies
Oven Baked Bean and Salami Soup
Lima Bean Soup with Apples and Butternut Squash
Shrimp, Prawns and Pepper Soup
Squid and Swiss Chard Soups Served over Herbed Polenta
Soup with Veal-Stuffed Lettuce Bundles
It is impossible to read this book and not have visions of a stone-walled kitchen, the air warm and scented with the smells of vegetables and perhaps a chicken or two. Outside, mountains surround you and the air is chilling. Inside, the soup is ready and you dip your spoon and the pleasure is all yours. The pleasure of Zuppa.