Ironic

One evening some people and I went out for dinner, we were celebrating something.  As custom and how is usually done, the waiter brought us the menu in order for us to order some of the food offert at the restaurant.  Well, I wasn’t very hungry at the moment since I was still excited about the event we had just gone to.   So decided to order a soup.  While dinner was in process, we chat, laugh, greet some people we met at the moment and some others from a long time ago, and that was that.

On the way to the residence, my curiosity to know the ingredients for the meal I just had drove me to research the recipe.  Not that I was going to cook it, mostly cause I was still wired up of energy, so i starting to surf the web and found different recipes, and one of them even had a brief preceding of how was this soup invented, so… that took me to look for the whole story behind my evening meal.  And this is what I found.

So the story goes that, the soups original meaning name was “a mix of all things” and it was “originally” invented in the pre-roman empire.   But it’s name was latin based which meant “cat” “gatto” + “one” = gattone = huge cat.  (I don’t know why).

In other words, the soup was made from small things left overs from previous meals together with whatever seasonal vegetables were available to create a large soup or soup one, in order to not waste food,  and more or less was intended for an everyday consumption with the idea of being filling, cheap and good, as opposed to being made for a special occasion such as marriage or a celebration, literally “poor kitchen” meaning poorer people’s cuisine.

The ingredients were pooled from ingredients of other dishes, often side dishes.  The soup’s history I am describing about is the Minestrone Soup, is one of the cornerstones of Italian cuisine, and is probably more widely dispersed and eaten throughout Italy than pasta.

As eating habits and ingredients changed in Italy, so did minestrone. The Roman army is said to have marched on minestrone and pasta faggioli (or beans and pasta), the former due to the long-life of dried goods, the latter making use of local and seasonal ingredients. In the 1300’s the word “minus” became a verb meaning “to serve” in the context of food and drink.  There are two schools of thought on when the recepie for minestrone soup became more formalized.

One argues that in the 1600’s and 1700’s the soup emerged as a soup using exclusively fresh vegetables and was made for its own sake (meaning it no longer relied on left-overs), while the other school of thought argues that the dish had always been prepared exclusively with fresh vegetables for its own sake since pre-roman times, but the name minestrone which lost its meaning of being made with left-overs and came to be associated with the dish in the 18th and 19th centuries.  In the modern era, the ready availability and long storage life of canned stocks and broths means that the most minestrone use stock or broth as a base, as opposed to the cheaper but still easier to find “water” or as i would say, “caldo”.

Either way, minestrone has evolved into becoming a dish made for its own sake and is now often consumed as a starter dish and found mostly on high rated restaurants.  In current Italian the word minestrone it’s still means a hodgepodge of things.