Minestra Maritata

Bitter greens married to a long pork broth, each cooked apart first.

Pork. Not vegetarian — contains pecorino whose rennet the source does not name, pork.

Ingredients

• 1 kg mixed pork — ribs, rind, a trotter, a piece of prosciutto bone
• 300 g pork sausage
• 500 g chicory
• 500 g escarole
• 300 g savoy cabbage
• 200 g borage or wild greens, if you can get them
• 1 dried chilli
• 100 g pecorino, grated
• 2 teaspoons salt

Method

1. Simmer all the pork in 3 litres of water for 3 hours, skimming often. Strain the broth and let it settle, then lift the fat off. Pick the meat from the bones.
2. BOIL EACH GREEN SEPARATELY in salted water, draining each as it is just tender — chicory takes 8 minutes, escarole 5, cabbage 10. They are all bitter to different degrees and cooking them together makes one flat bitter mass.
3. Squeeze them out and chop them coarsely.
4. Bring the degreased broth back to a simmer with the chilli, add the greens and the picked meat, and cook 20 minutes.
5. THE MARRIAGE IS THE NAME AND THE METHOD: the broth is rich and the greens are bitter, and the twenty minutes together at the end is the only point at which they meet. Cooked together from the start, neither tastes of anything.
6. Season and serve with pecorino. It is better the next day, when the greens have taken up more of the broth.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Italy · All recipes