Minestrone

Minestrone is a thick Italian vegetable soup, distinguished from pureed vegetable soups by its mixture of vegetables left in recognizable pieces rather than blended smooth, and it has no single fixed recipe. Common ingredients include onion, carrot, celery, potato, cabbage, tomato and courgette, often combined with legumes such as beans, chickpeas or fava beans, and sometimes with pasta or rice added, and the soup is traditionally made without meat. Its roots reach back to pre-Roman times, when the diet in much of Italy was largely vegetarian out of necessity, and the ancient Romans are known to have prepared similar thick vegetable soups of their own; tomatoes were only added after they arrived in Italy from the Americas in the sixteenth century. Minestrone is considered a classic example of cucina povera, Italy's tradition of frugal peasant cooking built from humble, rural ingredients rather than aristocratic cuisine, and its name is an augmentative form of minestra, the Italian word for soup.