The Key to Soupe au Pistou: Lots of Vegetables
My first experience of soupe au pistou, that vegetable soup from the South of France, was in a freezing cold Paris garret. From a can, in the middle of winter. It remains one of my warmest and most nourishing memories.
A shivering winter tableau, however, is not at all what usually comes to mind when one thinks of soupe au pistou. Sunlight, the blue Mediterranean, aromatic basil and garlic in a stone mortar, and a chilled bottle of rosé: that’s a more likely image.
American Francophile cooks in the last century learned this soup, along with dozens of other French classics, from one food authority after another, from Julia Child to Richard Olney to Paula Wolfert. The common wisdom is that the Provençale soupe au pistou and the Genovese minestrone al pesto are, in essence, twins separated at birth.
To be sure, much of the cooking in Nice resembles the food just across the Italian border. Pesto in Italy is a pounded mixture of basil, garlic, cheese and pine nuts. On the French side they leave the pine nuts out, and sometimes a small tomato is added instead. But given the size of Provence, pistou, as the soup is called, has at least as many regional variations as there are villages.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/dining/soupe-au-pistou-vegetable-soup-recipe.html?
