Minestra Invernale di Verza e Castagne di Guardia Piemontese

Name: Minestra Invernale di Verza e Castagne di Guardia Piemontese
Yield: serves 8
Ingredients: 2 pounds fresh chestnuts; 2 tablespoons fine sea salt; 3 tablespoons plus 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil; 3 ounces pancetta, finely diced; 3 ounces salt pork, finely diced; 1 large head firm fresh garlic cloves separated, unpeeled, and slightly crushed; 2 cups good red wine; 4 medium turnips, trimmed, peeled, and cut into 1/2-inch dice; 4 small carrots, trimmed, scraped, and sliced; 3 small leeks, trimmed, retain 1 inch of the green stems, split, rinsed, dried, and sliced; 1 small head Savoy cabbage, cored and coarsely shredded

January 24, 2012

A medieval fastness above the Mar Tirreno, Guardia Piemontese is a thirteenth-century village raised up by a band of French-descended, Waldensian heretics in flight from papal justice. Pursued into the pathlessness of Calabria, they resisted the Church’s soldiers then and again and again. Two hundred years had passed when, flush with the dramas of the inquisizione, Pius V dispatched a brigade up into their serene agrarian midst, calling for, in the names of Christ and the Holy Ghost, their massacre. Those few who escaped the flailing of the Church’s swords stayed. And those who were born of them stay, still, speaking a Provencale dialect and celebrating the traditions of French country life, gentling their patch of the earth as though time was a stranger. Too, they are true to their own and simple gastronomic heritage, having obliged no transfusion of the coarser Calabrian kitchen. Here follows a thick mountain soup, so like a Béarnais garbure (a thick cabbage soup from Béarn) even to the blessing of its last smudges with red wine as the French are wont to do à la faire chabrot—pouring a few drops of red wine into the last spoonful of soup, stirring it up and getting every last drop as both a blessing to the cook and a thank-you to God.

Recipe notes