How to prepare maneštra?

The basis of every manestra is three vegetables: beans, potatoes and either fresh or ground corn, fennel, chickpea or cabbage. It is this third ingredient that gives manestra its distinctive taste: corn gives it a touch of sweetness, fennel provides a fresh and bitter flavor, jota with cabbage sauerkraut is sour and tangy, and chickpea lends a creamy, mildly salty taste. The choice of the third ingredient was typically based on seasonality.

Manestra is easy to prepare. Its quality lies in the long, slow cooking of the vegetables on a low flame. Manestra made in a hurry is always a watery disappointment. Our grandmothers cooked the soup from morning until noon – a minimum of two hours.

For four portions, you need 300 to 500 grams of potatoes, about 250 grams of beans, and 150-400 grams of the third vegetable - at least 150 grams of chickpeas, about 400 grams of corn. Garlic, celery leaves, bay leaves, salt and pepper are added to taste.

The main challenge in the old days was how to thicken the manestra. Typically, this was done with a bacon and garlic pesto - finely chopped uncooked bacon, garlic and parsley mashed to a paste-like consistency. Pesto is put into the manestra as soon as it comes to the boil so that it will cook and integrate with the rest of the soup. Lighter manestras were thickened with a simple roux, and today the whole procedure has been reduced to simply adding two tablespoons of oil.

Meat, other than fat or bacon, was rarely added in the old days of poverty. The Istrian ham bone was seldom included since the Istrian peasant often sold prosciutto ham to pay the taxes and other costs of living. When the ham bone was added for flavor, it was often used more than once and even borrowed by neighbors to use again!