Recipe: Zuppa Valpellinese

2017-02-15 The traditional cuisine of the Valle d’Aosta region abounds in soups. Almost all of them are rustic recipes made from simple ingredients traditionally used in this mountainous region, such as rye bread, humble vegetables such as cabbage, and wild foods that can easily be found in the woods, such as chestnuts and apples.
With the addition of cheese, in a region of Italy which is home to plenty of top quality cheeses made from the milk of cows in “mountain pastures”, or meat, these hearty soups become a complete meal. They sublimely pamper the palate in the region’s cold winters, especially if served with a wine of significant complexity and persistent flavour and aroma.
In this post we will discuss Zuppa Valpellinese, a quick and easy soup that can be made in only an hour (thirty minutes of preparation time plus thirty minutes of cooking).
The ingredients for four people are: homemade day-old bread (500 g); Savoy cabbage (500 g); broth (1.5 litres); fontina cheese (200 g); butter (50 grams).
To make the soup: Wash the cabbage, discard the outer leaves and separate the remaining leaves from one another. Slice the day-old bread and toast it in a frying pan or in the oven with butter. Cut the fontina cheese into slices and remove the rind. In the meantime, blanch the cabbage leaves in boiling broth (you may use vegetable broth to make a vegetarian version of the soup), then drain them. Put the cabbage leaves in an oven-proof casserole, place slices of bread over them and top with slices of fontina cheese. Continue layering until you have used up all the ingredients, ending with cheese. Cover with boiling broth and bake at 180 degrees for about half an hour.
There are at least three other soups which are just as famous as Zuppa Valpellinese in Valle d’Aosta. Soupe Paysanne is made from sliced day-old rye bread, cubes of fontina and toma cheese, butter, onions and herbs, all covered with boiling broth and baked in the oven. Soupe Cogneintze is also made of rye bread cut into little pieces, cubes of fontina cheese and meat broth, with the addition of rice. The hearty Seupa de grì, which may be kept for two or three days after making it, is a traditional local soup made from barley cooked with pork ribs and seasonal vegetables.

Mariagrazia Villa

Recipe: chef Mario Grazia (Academia Barilla).
Source: Academia Barilla (ed.), Cucina Italiana. I grandi classici della nostra tradizione, Edizioni White Star, Novara, 2012.