The Italian Wedding Soup I Make Any Night for Quick Comfort

Major life events can change people and recipes. Italian wedding soup, as it is made in Italy, is loaded with several cuts of meat covered in long-cooked wilted vegetables like escarole and a generous dose of cheese. It’s a kind of rustic opulence, born not of wealth, but of deep connections to the land and its agricultural products. The meats may not be the most expensive cuts, but they’re generous to the point of gratuity and they’re delicious.

But the dish took on a new form when Italians immigrated to the United States. The meaty embarrassment of the original has been reduced to small, flavorful meatballs floating in broth, piles of vegetables in a more restrained pot full of simmered spinach or another leafy green, plus a few basic aromatic vegetables. These are the kinds of changes people make when they can’t get their hands on specialized imported products in a new country – and often couldn’t afford them even if they could. Minced meat, but stretched with bread for the meatballs? It’s doable and no one will complain about the meatballs.

Today, the soup known as Italian wedding soup in the United States shares little with its ancestor beyond a base of meat and vegetable broth. This is actually the marriage described – it has nothing to do with weddings.

If you want my unvarnished opinion, I think the original Italian wedding soup is more interesting, more delicious and more moving. But it’s also a lot more work. The Americanized version here wins in terms of convenience and flavor, delivering a warm and satisfying meal in a bowl that checks all the boxes and delivers more than enough deliciousness.

There are a few keys to creating flavor in this soup, and I’d say it starts with the broth, which is made up of a chicken broth base and lightly sautéed vegetables. Use homemade stock if you can; this will push the soup much further in the flavor department before you add much more. Store-bought broth can, of course, work, but its canned broth flavor will shine through in the finished dish.

Also important are the meatballs, which are the soup’s secret weapon for deeper flavor in every bite. I like to use a roughly equal mix of ground beef and pork: beef for richness, pork for a more tender texture. If you can get a ground meatball mix that also has veal, your meatballs will be even more tender and juicy.

In many of my previous meatball recipes, I’ve emphasized that the best approach is to use a panade made from bread soaked in a liquid like milk, which provides a much softer texture with welcome added moisture. Here, however, I opt for the convenience of breadcrumbs. They make denser, drier meatballs, but since they’ll end up in the bubbling soup, that doesn’t matter much: the meatballs will absorb the broth in the pot and bowl.

Since the meatballs are the show, I try to flavor them in every way: with herbs, cheese and lots of garlic.

One final note: If you use spinach for this, try to get ripe spinach, not baby spinach, which has become ubiquitous. Ripe spinach retains more texture when cooked and doesn’t turn into wet, slimy, disintegrating strands like baby spinach does. If you can only find baby spinach, you’re better off using a heartier, more flavorful green like Swiss chard or escarole. After all, if you’re involved in a life event as important as pairing greens with meat, you might as well choose those who are willing to do the work.

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