Marcella Hazan’s 30-Minute Soup Is a Forgotten Italian Comfort Food

Without a doubt, it’s soup season in New England. How do I know? The crisp, cool days and chilly nights. Yes, it’s time for all things cozy, and that means hot bowls of homemade soup. I can’t spend all day in the kitchen making long-simmered soups (as much as I’d like to), so I look for from-scratch soups that cook up quickly with lots of flavor.

This hidden gem of a recipe from Italian cooking icon Marcella Hazan fits the bill perfectly. 

What I Love About Marcella Hazan’s Traditional Recipes

Much as Julia Child did with French cuisine, Marcella Hazan introduced Americans to Italian cooking. Her first cookbooks, published in the 1970s, featured Italian ingredients unfamiliar to most home cooks, like extra virgin olive oil, arborio rice, and San Marzano tomatoes. Her recipes were a revelation of rich, vibrant flavor.

Unlike Julia Child, though, many of Hazan’s recipes are uncomplicated. Plenty of her traditional recipes are made with only a handful of ingredients, like her famous three-ingredient tomato sauce.

This recipe, for Hazan’s Spinach Soup, is similar. It’s a simple recipe that uses staple Italian ingredients to great effect. This forgotten soup is creamy, savory, and ideal for chilly nights.

How I Make Marcella Hazan’s Spinach Soup

Hazan’s recipe for Spinach Soup appears in her second cookbook, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. It puts the flavor and color of spinach front and center, with supporting actors in the form of beef broth, onion, butter, and Parmigiano Reggiano. The list of ingredients is simple, and the soup comes together in about 30 minutes.

• 2 pounds fresh spinach or 2 10-ounce packages frozen whole leaf spinach, thawed
• Salt
• 4 tablespoons butter
• 2 tablespoons chopped onion
• 2 cups Hazan’s Homemade Meat Broth or 2 cups canned beef broth
• 2 cups milk
• Whole or ground nutmeg
• 5 tablespoons freshly-grated Parmigiano Reggiano cheese
• Hazan’s recipe for crostini or regular croutons

One thing I appreciated immediately was the flexibility of this recipe. It calls for bunches of fresh spinach, but Hazan permits her readers to use frozen spinach if they choose; the soup can be prepared even faster with this substitution. The recipe also calls for Hazan’s Homemade Meat Broth, but again, she allows for readily available canned broth instead.

I chose to use fresh spinach, washing the leaves well in cold water to rinse away the dirt and trimming off the stems. Once the spinach is ready, the rest of the steps are even faster. 

Hazan’s directions say to add the spinach (along with some salt) to a pan with “no more water than what clings to its leaves.” It took seconds for the leaves to wilt down to a fraction of their fresh size. 

After squeezing out the excess liquid from the leaves, all that was left was to quickly sauté the spinach and onions in butter before adding broth, milk, and a pinch of nutmeg to the pot. The ingredients are simmered for five minutes, and then the soup is finished with a generous grating of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese. 

This soup tastes exactly as I’d hoped: cozy, comforting, warming. The soup has the mellowed flavor of cooked spinach against the savory, salty backdrop of onions and freshly grated Parmesan. The nutmeg is a faint note in the broth, but one that pairs so nicely with the spinach. 

I think I found my new favorite soup!

Tips for Making Marcella Hazan’s Spinach Soup

• If using fresh spinach, trim the stems first before washing the leaves. The trimming goes faster when the stems are all bundled together.
• Hazan recommends serving the soup with crostini; however, it’s just as delicious topped with store-bought or homemade croutons or served with slices of ciabatta.