Almost Italian

By now, you may have noticed—in our writing and from your own experience—that in most neighborhood old-school Italian-American restaurants, the concept of abbondanza meant lots of pasta, lots of sauce, and quite a bit of meat. In contrast, vegetable dishes, beyond token salads, were conspicuous by their absence from many menus.

When Italian immigrants opened their urban eateries, their clientele included significant numbers of German and Irish immigrants who had more interest in pasta with tomato sauce than in still-identifiable vegetables sautéed with garlic and olive oil. (One might dispute whether tomato sauce itself is a vegetable, but we’ll leave that to contemporary politicians wrangling over nutrition in school lunch programs.)

Even today, Rao’s Restaurant, arguably the most exclusive Italian-American restaurant in the Western Hemisphere, serves only four cooked vegetable “sides:” rapini (broccoli rabe), broccoli, Savoy cabbage, and escarole.

Yet, Italians loved vegetables and were skillful gardeners who introduced several Old World vegetables to Americans—notably, broccoli, fennel, zucchini, and escarole. And while the new immigrants were able to enjoy semolina pasta and meat far more often than they had in Italy, their cucina casalinga still centered on vegetables and pulses.

For evenings at home when neither pasta nor meat were on the menu, Italian-Americans often cooked some form of “beans and greens.” Back in Italy, the greens were likely to have been foraged—wild dandelions, borage, sorrel—whatever local goats and sheep had not yet nibbled. But here, southern Italian immigrants combined cannellini with spinach or escarole to make a dish that was neither contorno, vegetable dish, nor zuppa, soup.

As neighborhood restaurants gentrified, expanding their menus to include separate antipasto and soup courses, they began to offer variant forms of Minestrone, Pasta e Fagiole, as well a Scarola e Fagiole, a thick soup of escarole and beans.

By the 1980’s, as Americans became more conscious of the much-vaunted Mediterranean Food Pyramid, Escarole and Bean Soup, along with nothing more than a piece of good crusty bread, attained status as a trendy, complete, and virtuous meal.

Note: We use water rather than chicken stock, although you’re welcome to use either. Generally, the only time Nonna would have used chicken stock in a soup would have been when she had just boiled a stewing fowl. Like all good cooks, she would have found a use for the flavorful broth.

Escarole and Beans

Ingredients:

2-3 Tbsp. Olive oil
3 - 4 Cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 tsp. crushed red pepper flakes
1 Head escarole, approximately 1 Lb., washed and chopped into bite-sized pieces
2 14 oz. cans cannellini, drained and rinsed
Salt & freshly ground black pepper
Freshly grated Parmesan
Slices of rustic bread

Preparation:

Heat a soup pot over medium-high heat and add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Add the garlic and red pepper flakes and sauté for a minute or two. Add the escarole and stir to coat with the oil. Sauté, stirring occasionally, until the escarole begins to wilt.

Stir in the beans. Lower the heat, add up to a cup of water (more if you prefer it soupier), season with salt and pepper, and simmer for five to ten minutes.

To Serve:

Divide equally among four soup bowls, drizzle a little more olive oil over each serving, and garnish with the Parmesan. Serve with a slice of good crusty bread. Or, garnish with homemade croutons.

Serves four