I’m hugely grateful that my own Mum was a good deal more adventurous than most Northern Irish housewives of her generation. Being chummy with Signora Battisti, an actual Italian Mamma whose husband ran the fish-and-chip shop down the street, probably had quite a bit to do with that… :->
Here’s a recipe Mum learned before I was born.
Back then olive oil was something you got from the chemist (Olive Oil B.P., meaning British Pharmacopoeia, not British Petroleum), pasta meant macaroni, tomato soup was far easier to find than tinned tomatoes, and buying garlic if you weren’t “foreign” (Mum told me) meant you were “odd”.
Well, Mum was odd…
I have no idea what the original Italian soup might have been, and I’d long thought adding spuds was an Irish modification, but much, much later, when @dduane and I were travelling through Cividale and Bolzano, we discovered that dishes including both potatoes and pasta were correct for that region, right up north where Italy bumps against Austria.
Though we’ve never been to Southern Italy, Pasta e patate con pomodoro (pasta, potatoes and tomato) is a standard dish there, too. That link is in Italian, but Google Translate works fine.
(I can’t recall, if I ever knew, whether the Battisti family were from North or South.)
Better olive oil, chopped tomatoes in juice rather than canned soup, and actual cream, will make it taste more Italian and authentic, whatever “authentic” means here. You can whizz it canned-soup smooth with a stick mixer before adding the potatoes and pasta, but that’s not compulsory.
However the original Heinz-based version is my preferred comfort food whenever I’m feeling down, or when the weather’s lousy, or when I have a cold…
Or when I want to go back in time to when I was young, and my parents were alive, and a bowl of home-made soup was enough to set the world to rights.
The ingredients:
2 Tbsp olive oil
4 cloves garlic, sliced very thin
2 medium onions, chopped
2 400g / 14 oz tins tomato soup
2 tins water
2 medium potatoes, peeled & diced
2 handfuls macaroni
(DD suggests 1 handful = 3/4 cup, so about 125g. She also points out that in the US, a 400g can of soup usually means Campbell’s Condensed. However Mum always used Heinz Cream of Tomato, which wasn’t condensed, so YMMV.)
Heat the oil in a saucepan over low heat.
Add the garlic and cook for a couple of minutes.
Add the onions and cook until starting to soften.
Add the soup and water.
Bring to a simmer…
and add the potatoes.
(DD’s note: Make sure you stir the soup at least every couple of minutes from this point onwards, as the potatoes and macaroni will release a lot of starch as they cook… and if you don’t stir frequently, you’ll wind up with a thick and possibly scorched mess at the bottom.)
After about 10 minutes, add the macaroni.
(DD’s note: Keep stirring frequently.)
After about another 10 minutes, check texture: potatoes and macaroni should finish at about the same time.
Serve garnished with chopped parsley, and a stack of hot buttered toast on the side.
BTW, forget trying to keep the pasta al dente. If the potatoes are waxy they’ll have far more texture than the macaroni, but usually everything goes soft and unctuous and garlicky, hence the beneficial contrast of nice crisp toast.
Side-note—if the weather’s really lousy, add in a splash of Worcester sauce and a generous dash of Tabasco or similar chilli sauce. It works. Alternately, or additionally, swirl a drizzle of that better olive oil onto each bowl, add a dollop of sour cream to the middle of the swirl and dust that with chopped parsley.
The result imitates Italy’s red-white-green national colours (Margharita pizza does it too) and also looks jolly flash.
They”ll be listed here, bear with us
Stuff we’ve seen and found interesting, things we want, things you might want, who knows…?
Other people’s recipes that have worked really well
