Minestrone Soup – Garden in a Cup is a delicious, easy-to-make soup that uses up the vegetables you’ve got on hand. Like the variety of choices you have in planting vegetables in the spring, there is lots of room for flexibility in this recipe. The result is a delightful garden in a cup.
Regardless of the season or the century, serving soup with supper is a way to lighten the calorie load in the evening as our activity level drops. At Finlaystone Estate we had soup every night to begin supper. When I was Cooky there, I would have to make soup from whatever was on hand: carrots, lovage, sorrel, rice, lettuce, you name it. I would bury my nose in Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management, a tome of 4,000 recipes published in 1861 in Victorian England, where I excitedly would find my first steps forward in soup recipe adventures.
Jane MacMillan’s herbaceous border at Finlaystone Estate, home of the Chief of the Clan MacMillan, Renfrewshire, Scotland. Photo by rampantscotland.com.
I was 20 years old and it was 1979. My kitchen at the Scottish great house consisted of a game larder where the sheep, pigeons, rabbits and various game was put to rest after being shot by the gamekeeper, Mr. Blackistock. They hung there on hooks until they were “high” and ready for Cooky to prepare to eat. The larder was a cool room, adjacent to the scullery, with no heating or cooling, just three-foot thick walls, where we left out the huge cheeses, etc., and they remained perfectly cool there, in any season.
The scullery is where the dishes were done and where I plucked, skinned and cut up the meat for dinner. In the huge main kitchen was a coal-burning Esse that we cooked in with a constantly running hot and warm oven, a bake house where the tea cakes, breads and sweets were stored, and a large pantry, where the chutney, jams, marmalade and home-canned fruits and vegetables were stored.
Meals were prepared in the main kitchen, then placed on the two-story, wheeled trolley just moments before the meal, and rolled down the hallways through the service kitchen to the dining room. A Victorian-era cookbook fit the scene perfectly, and since I didn’t quite know what I was doing, Mrs. Beeton’s was a great asset in delivering good results for the British tastes of Lady M, Sir Gordon and the rest of the family as I learned to cook. This fits another theme of Food for the Ages: cook and serve to the tastes of your audience so they recognize the heat, the flavorings, textures and manners of their world.
Mrs. Beeton’s aside, this recipe is adapted from Escoffier’s Minestra from Le Guide Culinaire, which is the French Bible of Great Cooking, another HUGE influence in my cooking life. I have made this minestrone soup many times with rave reviews and results.
If you don’t have peas and green beans, you can use whatever other vegetables, such as zucchini, yellow squash or even cannellini beans. But beware that there is something about the cabbage and turnip that makes their absence noticed along with the other basics: carrot, onion, leek and celery… Be sure these characters are all part of the pot!
Fresh tomatoes, cabbage, turnip, carrots, celery then add fresh or frozen peas, green beans or whatever greens or green veggies you have on hand.
I used my homemade chicken stock for this soup.
Minestrone Soup
2 bacon rashers. Place in a large pot and cook until browned then remove from pot.
Add to the pot: 4 Tbsp chopped onion and 2 leeks, chopped, using the white part only, and cook together until lightly golden, about 10 minutes.
Add to the pot, 7 cups of your homemade chicken stock or water. If you use water, add a ½ tsp of salt. Add 4 Tbsp each of chopped carrot and turnip, 2 Tbsp chopped celery, and ½ cup chopped potato, a ½ cup chopped cabbage and two chopped, ripe tomatoes.
Bring to a boil and simmer gently then after approximately 30 minutes, add ½ cup frozen peas, and a ¼ cup green beans and ½ cup orzo or rice. Yes, broken spaghetti will do as well!
Let the soup cook on very low heat for one more hour. At the last minute add one clove chopped garlic and several fresh basil leaves, shredded.
Other soup recipes from FFA:
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