The recipe of beans and escarole soup, typical of Neapolitan cuisine and suitable for cold winter days
How to warm up the last days of winter, if not with one tasty flat soup of beans and escarole?
The traditional Neapolitan recipe with these legumes and vegetables dates back to the poor Neapolitan tradition and it is an essentially convivial dish that, even if it did not initially provide the accompaniment with roasted stale bread, over time this combination has enlivened the lunches and dinners of all the Neapolitans.
So, we suggest you prepare many croutons and enjoy it in company! Follow our recipe, which proposes the classic preparation and serve it especially in the coldest periods of the year.
Ingredients
- 2 bundles of Neapolitan escarole or chard
- 300 gr dried cannellini beans
- two cloves of garlic
- 50 gr pork lard
- salt, extra virgin olive oil and pepper
- 300 gr in slices of stale bread
Preparation
Let's start with the blanch the white cannellini beans in water for at least 2 hours on normal fire or 30 minutes in the pressure cooker. Meanwhile, we clean and remove the cores of the escarole, eliminating as much as possible the soil that accumulates between the leaves and also blanch these in slightly salted water for 10 minutes. Then, let's drain them and let them cool.
In a large saucepan, preferably earthenware, brown one of the two garlic cloves in the lard and add the vegetables, adding salt and pepper to taste. Let them cook for about 5 minutes and then add the beans now softened with a little bit of the water in which they are cooked. In this way, we will form a real tasty soup.
Let the soup cook for other 20-30 minutes and in the meantime we prepare the croutons of stale bread rubbing the other garlic clove on their surface and seasoning them with salt, oil and pepper to taste. Toast the slices of bread in the oven at 200 °, or in the pan for about 2-3 minutes, and serve them with the bean soup and steaming escarole.
