The domain of the gardener
(Dove l'orto era protagonista)
Italy is a land of contrasts, a marriage of refinement and the rustic. It does both extremely well, usually simultaneously. As I often say, they have mastered the art of having one foot in a gardening boot and the other in a Salvatore Ferragamo calf-skin shoe.
When I was a student in Italy back in 1992, I remember reading an article in The European newspaper on the Italian Federal Parliament. Of course, the Italian Parliament is famous for a lot of things, good and bad, but in this article the author was talking about a curious topic: the fact that many Italian federal politicians maintained their own private vegetable gardens. I can’t remember the exact figure, but it was extraordinary, something like over 50 per cent. If you have lived in Italy or know Italians, you will understand and be amused by this. In Italy, gardening is in the blood.
Soup is food from the garden, and the garden is extremely important in all parts of Italy. It is not surprising, then, that every region of Italy specialises in soup. In most cases, soup is cucina rustica (rustic cooking) at work, giving an enormous amount of nourishment and satisfaction from simple ingredients. Soups fill us up, warm us up and make us feel good. By definition, soups are simple one-pot meals and most Italians melt before a simple soup done well.
I grew up eating a lot of soups. Most contained some form of pasta and comprised an entire meal. These types of soups are particularly popular in southern Italy, a legacy of a time much less abundant than the times we live in now. It is ironic that the soup-based diet of my father’s youth, packed full of vegetables and legumes and drizzled with fresh extra virgin olive oil, was extremely healthy. They believed that they had a poor diet because it lacked animal protein. Now we are constantly encouraged to move back to a similar, simpler way of eating. Not a bad way to go, in my mind.
And it is funny how things evolve over time, how we are not very interested in certain foods as children and then crave them as adults. This is definitely my experience with these kinds of pasta soups. My mum and dad had to virtually force-feed these soups to me and my brothers Ross and Paul. I can’t speak for my brothers, but now I love them all. I believe this process is more than simply a maturing of taste buds; it also has something to do with the connection between memory and emotion. Whichever way you look at it, the soups taste great.
The recipes in this section are hearty and flavoursome one-pot meals, perfect for modern living. I like all of them during the cooler months of the year and also enjoy the lighter broth-based soups, particularly the seafood and fish soups, in spring and even summer.
