This recipe for the classic Italian soup is actually adapted from one taken from a French website — Ma Vegetable. 

As there is no real set recipe, you can vary the vegetables according to season and taste. It can also be made with meat, but more than a little — perhaps 100g, about a quarter, of mince — is against the spirit of Italian peasant food, in which, for obvious reasons, meat is more often a flavouring than a genuine main ingredient. 

Some kind of beans seem to be the only absolutely sine qua non of minestrone making.

All of these point to this having long been a food of the poor and as Italy is, according to the EU statistical service Eurostat, the only country in western Europe with more of what it terms “severely materially deprived people” than Britain, there should be a big and growing market for this soup in both countries.

Ingredients

• 2 large onions, chopped fine
• 2 large cloves of garlic, or more to taste, crushed or grated
• 3 tbsp olive oil (or rapeseed oil if you can’t afford olive)
• 6oz/170g potatoes, diced
• 6oz/170g carrots, diced
• 400g mixed cooked beans (use tinned, or soak about a third of this weight for 8 hours, then boil them until soft)
• 4oz/110g garden peas (frozen are fine)
• 4oz/110g green leaf vegetable (eg. chard, spinach, green cabbage), shredded
• 5oz/140g of macaroni or similar pasta
• Bay leaf
• 2 tbsp tomato puree
• 2 ½ pints/1.5l stock, hot
• Chopped fresh parsley
• Salt & pepper

What to do

Fry the onions and garlic in the olive oil over a moderate heat until golden brown, then add the potatoes, carrots, bay leaf and greens.

Stir once, for just a few seconds, then pour on the hot stock and the tomato puree.

As soon as the soup reaches boiling point, add the pasta, beans and peas and cook vigorously until the pasta is ready — the time this takes is usually indicated on the pack.

Stir in the chopped parsley, season and serve.

This is a meal in itself, but if you want to enhance it, serve it with ciabatta or similar bread.