Hemingway soup
4 Servings
Ingredients
| Quantity | Ingredient | |
|---|---|---|
| 3 | tablespoons | Extra-virgin olive oil |
| 1 | Onion; finely chopped | |
| 2 | Leeks (white part only); thinly sliced | |
| 4 | Cloves garlic; minced | |
| 1 | pounds | Serrano or prosciutto ham; in one piece |
| ½ | pounds | Dried white beans |
| Salt and freshly ground black pepper | ||
| 1 | cup | Thinly sliced green or white cabbage |
| 1 | cup | Fresh green beans snapped into; halves |
| 1 | cup | Frozen green peas |
Directions
In a medium (4- to 6-quart) soup pot over low heat, combine olive oil, onion, leeks and garlic. Saute until onion has softened, about 10 minutes.
Add 9 cups of water, ham, white beans and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer, covered, until beans are tender, about 2½ hours.
Add cabbage and green beans. Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Add green peas and continue to simmer for 5 minutes more. Remove and discard ham.
Adjust seasonings and serve.
NOTES : About 80 miles east of Bilbao, across Euskal Herria, as the Basques call their mountainous region, is Burguete, a town that has long depended on tourists and is eager for more. There, the region's association with Hemingway lives on. The novelist stopped at Burguete to fish for trout...in 1924. And Jake Barnes, the narrator of "The Sun Also Rises," goes to Burguete with his friend Bill Gorton before the bullfights. They stay at an inn about 3000 feet above sea level. Though it's late June, the low-ceilinged, oak-paneled dining room is cold. Bill sits at a piano and plays to keep warm. "The girl brought in a big bowl of vegetable soup and the wine," Hemingway wrote... By that slender thread hangs the tourist trade of the Hostal Burguete, a converted farmhouse. One tour group that stopped there this fall had mixed feelings about Hemingway, but praised the soup unanimously. - --S.A. Belzer, New York Times (reprinted in The Sacramento Bee January 14, 1998).
Recipe by: adapted from a soup at Hostal Burguete in Spain Posted to recipelu-digest Volume 01 Number 526 by Crane Walden <cranew@...> on Jan 14, 1998