Fork and Gobble It: Peasant Soup and Burgundy

Fridays on the BottleBlog will feature a food-related article, wine pairing, or travelogue. Today, Wine Manager Mark Ricca makes a delicious Peasant Soup!

Every cook I know has a repertoire of soups that they revisit with the coming of each winter. Old favorites and new ideas make their appearance on the stovetop, helping to comfort and warm throughout the cold and dark months ahead. I myself use the Sundays that I have off to batch cook. I produce anywhere from six to eight quarts of soup in the afternoon, have it for dinner that night, and freeze the rest in small quantities to be thawed and consumed at a later time. Not unlike squirrels and acorns, my freezer becomes a food stash to get me through to spring.

Most of the recipes are basic, sprung from peasant cooking based on unpretentious ingredients. You know, comfort food. Remember the old childrens' tale Stone Soup about the stranger who comes into town. He extols the virtues of the soup he makes from nothing more than a magic stone he carries and water. When someone questions how good a soup could be when made from just a stone and water, the clever stranger replies, "Well, if we only had an onion, that might make it a little better." Of course someone spares an onion, and then a carrot, and then a ham bone, and so on and so forth. When the soup is finally done all the villagers marvel at the delicious soup made simply from a stone and water.

The soup I made last week is sort of like that stone soup. It is based loosely on Ribollita, the Italian peasant soup that was born of leftovers.

I start the way I start many of my soups, with a base of mirepoix vegetables. Mirepoix is the French term for onion, celery, and carrot in the following proportion: 40% onion, and 30% each carrot and celery. There will be no exact measurements here, as they are really not required. This is about as informal a soup as can be but it is really hearty, warming and very delicious. I'll list what I put in last time I made it, but feel free to vary ingredients and use your imagination.

-A few cloves of garlic sliced
-A medium sized onion diced
-A few carrots peeled and diced
-A few stalks of celery washed and diced

The cuts should look like the picture to the left.

All the vegetables are cut to the same size. I heat some olive oil in a soup pot and start by cooking the onion and garlic together over a medium/low heat covered with a lid, so that they "sweat." Season with a good quality salt such as Kosher or sea salt, and a small pinch of crushed red pepper. I then add the celery and carrot and let them "sweat" as well. With each successive ingredient I allow them to cook for enough time to develop flavor.

This is a concept that the Italian cooking instructor and cookbook author Marcella Hazan refers to as "insaporire."

What makes this soup so hearty is the addition of canelline beans which I cook from dried. One pound of beans made its way into this recipe. While I was preparing the mirepoix, the beans were cooking in a separate pot. Cooking beans is simply a matter of putting them in a sufficiently large pot and cooking them in four to five times their volume of water. That starchy cooking water then will then be added to the soup to give it body. I don't salt my beans until the last ten minutes or so of cooking time (about 1 – 1 ½ hours) so I can better control the overall seasoning of the soup. If you like, throw a couple of whole, peeled cloves of garlic and any whole herbs you like into the pot with the beans to give them additional flavor.

After the mirepoix is in and cooked I added in the following order:

-A small head of green or Savoy cabbage diced
-A head of cauliflower cut into small florets
-A head of broccoli cut into small florets
-A 28 oz. can of crushed tomatoes
-The cooked beans and their liquid (remove the herbs but leave the garlic)

**I added a quart of chicken stock here. Omit it if you want to keep the soup vegetarian and just use water. The soup won't suffer. I added another quart of water besides the stock, so just use two of water.

Now, here's the "stone," the ingredient that makes it all magical. Parmigiano cheese rinds!!! It's no secret if you are familiar with Italian peasant cooking. Those rinds are worth their weight in gold, well almost. If you buy good quality Parmigiano, save those rinds. I wrapped them in cheesecloth, tied it all up with a long string to hang over the side of the pot, and tossed them in.

Let them simmer in there with the rest of the ingredients, but you'll need to remove them after an hour or so or they will disintegrate into messy blobs. You'll smell it as the soup cooks, the cheese adds a wonderful fragrance and flavor. Once the cheese is out, the soup is done. Check it for seasoning.

Make a green salad, grab a really good loaf of crusty bread and go to town, or village if you will. I grate some additional Parmigiano over the top of the soup, and add a splash of good extra virgin olive oil.

Now when you consider the flavors at play here; vegetables, herbs, acid from tomatoes, earthiness, and richness, what wine would work with that? I went with a village level Burgundy. What does that mean? Well, in a nutshell the Burgundy region of France classifies its wines on three levels: Region (Burgundy), Village (in this case Marsannay), and vineyard. The more specific and finite the area from whence the wine came, the higher the presumption of identity and therefore quality (not to mention $$$). There are some great buys at the village level and my personal favorite is Marsannay. This one was made by Bruno Clair, the vintage was 2006, and it sells for about $32.00, which is pretty reasonable in Burgundy terms. Medium bodied with flavors of bright red fruits like cherries and strawberries (not sweet), earth and mineral, it met perfectly with the similar flavors of the soup.

So get in there and play! If you have questions, comments, or requests, direct them to the website, and come in and see me if you're in the neighborhood!