My greenmarket this week had the season’s first Costata Romanesco zucchini. These ridged, dark-and-light-green-striped squashes are our favorite variety of zucchini. Joyfully, I acquired a pair of small, straight ones.
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Normally I’d have just sliced and sauteed these firstlings in butter or olive oil. However, a cookbook I’d recently been given had a recipe I was curious about, called Minestra di Zucchini – a sort of soup. I say “sort of” because while the Italian word “minestra” does mean soup, the culinary category of minestra can include dishes with mostly solid ingredients and only a little liquid.
So it was with this dish in Katie Parla’s Food of the Italian South. The photo on the page facing the recipe was attractive but puzzling: The edible clusters in the bowl hardly looked like zucchini, and I couldn’t see how following the directions given would produce that appearance.
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Curiosity piqued, I set about preparing the simple ingredients for about one-third of the recipe, which was what my 12 ounces of zucchini could make. Shown below are zucchini “cut into bite-size pieces,” chopped onion, fresh mint, grated Parmigiano cheese, and an egg. Not shown, olive oil, salt, black pepper, and water.
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The cooking began by softening the onion for a few minutes in a little olive oil.
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Next was to add the zucchini to the pot, along with salt and a third of a cup of water. That was all the liquid the dish had.
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Covered, the pot simmered for about 20 minutes, until the zucchini were soft and fully cooked. They did exude some of their own water, at least.
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Meanwhile, I was stirring together two-thirds of the beaten egg with a quarter-cup of grated cheese and two teaspoons worth of torn mint leaves. Such tiny measurements that scaled-down recipes require!
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When the zucchini were ready, I added the egg-cheese-mint mixture to the pot, stirred everything together, and added salt and pepper. That was it: The minestra was ready to serve.
.It looked nothing at all like its picture in the book, either in textures or in colors.
It was good, though. The vegetable sweetness of the zucchini made for gentle comfort food, which was highlighted by the complementary flavors of mint and grated cheese – very easy eating and a true country-kitchen dish..
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But I just don’t see how the book’s photo could be of a dish made according to this recipe. What happened there – a printer’s error? a wrong illustration? a food stylist run mad? Guess I’ll never know.
I’ll keep this in mind as our zucchini start to multiply!
Yours looks just like the version I grew up with.
That’s a comfort — thanks!
Diane, I had 2 zucchini languishing in my refrigerator, intended for soup. They looked to be about 12 oz. so I made your recipe. My result wasn’t pretty either, but it made a good lunch on a cool day. I like the mint flavor.
Jennifer, your soup is closer to the image in the book than mine was. The egg and cheese ought to look like yours. And now I think I know why mine didn’t. I had stirred together the egg-cheese-mint mixture ahead of time and let it sit until we were ready to eat. So apparently the cheese dissolved in the egg, turning the whole addition into a liquid, rather than having the little crumbles for texture. My bad.