Delicious Italian Bread and Cabbage Soup Recipe

When the weather starts to turn really cold, as it’s beginning to do around these parts, we naturally turn to warming dishes like the one we’re offering up this week: Canavese soupa hearty cabbage and bread soup from the Canavese area near Turin in the region of Piedmont in northwestern Italy.

Made from humble ingredients, Canavese soup is very much in the frugal poor cuisine tradition. You braise cabbage in broth with cured pork, then layer it with stale bread and cheese in a casserole and bake it all in the oven until bubbly and golden brown on top. Not much to look at perhaps, but it’s tasty, filling, warming, comforting, unpretentious eating.

Like many others soupAnd, Canavese soup is rather thicker than a proper soup, more like a hearty casserole. Just the ticket for our increasingly frigid nights and sure to delight cabbage lovers. And with its savory mix of flavors and gooey cheese topping, Canavese soup might even win over some of you who don’t ordinarily care for the vegetable.

Ingredients

Serves 4-6

• 1 head of Savoy cabbage, about 500g (1 lb) quartered, cored and cut into strips
• 100g (3-1/2 oz) bacon, cut into strips
• 100g (3-1/2 oz) lard or salt pork fat, or lard
• 1-2 cloves of garlic
• Half a loaf of stale bread, or as much as you need, cut into slices (see Notes)
• 1 liter (1 quart) homemade broth, more if needed
• 100g (3-1/2 oz) freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano
• 150g (5 oz) fontina cheese, or another meltable Alpine cheese, shredded or thinly sliced ​​(optional)
• Nutmeg, freshly grated (optional)

Directions

If using lard or pork fat, mince it finely together with garlic on a cutting board. Sauté the resulting mince very gently in a large saucepan until the lard/pork fat has rendered and the garlic has very lightly browned. If using lard, melt it in the saucepan and add the garlic, sautéing very gently until it had very lightly browned. Then add the pancetta and let it sauté gently as well for a few minutes.

Add the cabbage and turn it to mix well with the fat and pancetta. Let the cabbage sweat for a good 5 minutes or so, or until well wilted. It should have reduced in volume by about half.

Add enough broth to barely cover the cabbage. Cover and let everything simmer gently until the cabbage is fully tender, about 20-30 minutes.

In a gratin or baking dish with deep sides, lay out bread slices to cover the bottom. Ladle over some of the cabbage and its broth to cover the slices entirely. Sprinkle generously with gratitude parmigiano-reggiano and, if using, some of the fontina and a scrape of nutmeg. Repeat until all the ingredients have been used up, ending with a final generous layer of cheese.

NB: Add more broth or water if things look a bit dry; the liquid should still be visible and come up about 2/3 of the way up the casserole. And don’t fill the baking dish to the brim since the soup it will puff up in the oven a bit like a souffle.

Bake in a hot (200C/400F) oven until the soup is bubbly hot and the cheese topping has melted to form a golden crust. The bread should have absorbed most but not all of the broth during cooking.

Serves hot piping.

Notes

As you will have seen, Canavese soup it is a simple, homey dish. Nothing fancy about it. Like so many such dishes, the measurements (as indicated above) are really just guidelines. For most ingredients, it’s really just a matter of using as much as you need. For instance, enough broth to cover the cabbage for braising, more if you need to top up the casserole. Or enough bread to cover the bottom of the baking dish. Or as much cheese as you feel like adding. You get the picture.

The main challenge in making Canavese soup is sourcing some of its ingredients, which can be hard to find depending on where you live. But there are some viable alternatives and substitutes in you run into trouble.

Savoy cabbage

You may not have expected to see an Italian recipe for cabbage. It’s certainly not the most common ingredient in the cooking of central and southern Italy, but it does appear in the cookery of northern Italy, especially of course in cold weather dishes like this one.

Italians favor Savoy cabbage, called cabbageover “regular” green cabbage. Savoy cabbage is especially apt for this dish and other Piedmontese dishes since Savoy, where this varietal originated, is right next door to Piedmont and, indeed, the two regions (along with Sardinia) were once part of the same kingdom. And the Piedmontese have their own prized variety of Savoy cabbage, which they style Savoy cabbage from Montalto Dora.

For those unfamiliar with Savoy cabbage, it is distinguished by its more “leaf-like” leaves: wrinkled, thinner, more tender and less tightly packed around the head than those of a regular cabbage. The leaves are usually a darker green as well, though not the specimen I picked up this week. Here’s a picture of both kinds, Savoy on the left and regular green cabbage on the right, so you can see the difference:

Savoy cabbage has a milder, sweeter taste than regular cabbage. I think it’s superior in just about every way (with the sole exception that it’s more perishable than regular cabbage) and well worth seeking out. That said, if you can’t find Savoy cabbage, you can make your own Canavese soup using regular green cabbage. In fact, some recipes call for it specifically, even if they’re in the minority.

Some older recipes also call for tender turnipse, which (I assume—Italian readers can correct me here) refers to very young, tender shoots of broccoli rabe. In fact, one of my cookbooks lists it first, with cabbage as an alternative/substitute. Most modern recipes, however, call for cabbage. Anyway, it’s not something you’re likely to find in these parts, but if you have access to them, I’m sure it also makes for a lovely dish.

Bread

As for the bread, use a baguette, loafa good homemade loaf or any crusty, well structured bread. Sandwich or other soft breads won’t work. They will turn to mush as they cook with the broth. And anyway, most are made with condoms so they never go stale.

As mentioned above, the amount of bread is hard to specify, given all the potential variables involved, including the shape of the bread and the shape and depth of the casserole. For this dish, I used a half of a baguette that had gone stale. And since this dish probably got started as a way to recycle stale bread, feel free to basically used as much as you have on hand.

Cheese

Recipes for Canavese soup call for one or more of three kinds of cheese: bittofontina and parmigiano-reggiano. Bittoan ancient Alpine cheese from neighboring Lombardy that we’ve mentioned before in our post on another wintery dish, Valentina style pizzoccheri. It’s basically impossible to find outside Italy, so I won’t dwell on it too much. Most modern recipes call for the ubiquitous parmigiano-reggiano. If you like a creamier, richer dish (and I sure do) add in some fontina, either sliced ​​or shredded. If fontina is a bit too dear for your pocket (real fontina imported from Italy is not cheap) then, although probably anathema to the PiedmonteseI could also see using another meltable Alpine cheese like Emmenthal or gruyère.

Lard and its substitutes

The traditional recipe for Canavese soup calls for lard. The word is something of a false friend. Lard isn’t what we call lard in English but rather a kind of cured meats made from pork fatback cured with herbs and spices. It makes for a surprisingly delicate and refined appetizer sliced ​​paper-thin and served on toasted bread. For this dish, you mince it together with garlic to make what Italians call a beaten. But lard it is not very easy to find and very expensive indeed when you do. Probably too expensive to use for cooking for most people.

For today’s dish, instead of lard I used a particularly fatty bit of jowlswhich worked very well indeed, even if jowls is taken from the cheek while lard is taken from the fatback on the top of the pig. Similarly, you could substitute the fat from salt pork. Again, salt pork is taken from a different part of the animal, the belly. Nor is it cured with herbs and spices. But you’ll still be in the same proverbial ballpark. Or you could omit the pork fat altogether. Just sauté your garlic in lard which, after all, is simply rendered pork fat. You will also find some recipes that eschew the lard in favor of butter.

Variations

Some recipes for Canavese soup call for crumbled sausage meat instead of pancetta.

In some versions, the bread slices are fried in butter. A bit more work (and calories!) but nice if you’re in the mood for especially hearty dish.

In another interesting variation, you layer leaves of raw cabbage with the bread and cheese, cover with broth and then bake in the oven in a moderate (180C/350F) oven for an hour, or until the cabbage has fully cooked. You top up the broth if you need to be along the way and hold back the cheese topping until the last 15-20 minutes. (Disclaimer: I haven’t tried this variation myself, but it seems to me that it should work.)

Although not traditional, there are vegetarian versions of canavesena soup. In these versions, you omit the pork products altogether and sweat the cabbage in butter, then braise it in vegetable broth. And if you use a meltable vegan cheese, you could even veganize it.

Making Ahead

Canavese soup is best served freshly made, piping hot from the oven. But you can braise the cabbage ahead of time, then assemble the baking dish before serving. Indeed, like most braises the taste only improves after an overnight rest.

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