This post originally appeared on Food52.
Even over email, Victor Hazan writes with emotive, well-built prose that could convince you to delete your emoji keyboard and sign up for a poetry retreat.
“Do you know the cannellini soup with garlic and parsley?” he asked.
“There is no more perfect example of Marcella’s historic contribution to cooking in our time, of how much taste you can produce with the fewest ingredients,” he continued. “Or, as she used to tell her students, what you leave out is just as important as what you put in.”
What this cannellini soup leaves out are most of the distractions you might expect: There are no chunks of carrots, celery, or onion; no bacon or ham hock; no kale. Only five ingredients are left standing, three of them anchoring the recipe’s title: beans, garlic, parsley, olive oil, broth. The soup also simmers for just 10 minutes.
If this sounds bare bones, it’s for good reason. “The soup was Marcella’s father’s,” Victor told me. “His extremely frugal cooking, generated both by inclination and necessity, laid the basis for the cooking that eventually Marcella made her own. The most expensive ingredient was the salt.”
I have questions. If someone else had written this, would it still be this good? (Only if it were written as thoughtfully.) If you stumbled across it in an anonymous Google search, would you try it? (Almost definitely not.)
Luckily, because the recipe comes from Marcella’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, you can know—without asking—to trust it. And as you make the soup, all 10 minutes of it, you’ll better understand why this is all that it needs to be.
Your first clue is that there’s not a mere tablespoon or glug of olive oil, but a half cup, which cushions the broth and quickly becomes a messenger for toasted garlic.
After five minutes, halfway through your simmer time, you scoop out some of the beans, purée them, then stir them back in for an even more luxurious stew, one that seems like it could have been simmered for hours.
Victor recommends cooking your own dried beans, which can take as little as 45 minutes if they’re brined and soaked first. He’s especially fond of the creamy sorana bean (a cannellini variant) that Rancho Gordo recently named after Marcella.
“On the one or two occasions that we gave in to the temptation of canned beans we regretted it,” Victor told me. But out of necessity, I’ve found that this method is the best (and quickest) way to improve them, and I’ve never regretted a thing about it.
Marcella Hazan’s White Bean Soup with Garlic and Parsley
Recipe adapted slightly from Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking
Serves 4 to 6
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
6 cups cooked cannellini or other white beans—either canned or cooked from 2 cups dried (recommended)
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
1 cup homemade broth or water (or 1/3 cup canned beef stock diluted with 2/3 cup water)
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
Thick grilled or toasted slices of crusty bread (optional)
See the full recipe at Food52.
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