Recipe - Hemingway Soup

3 tablespoon Extravirgin olive oil
1 Onion; finely chopped
2 Leeks (white part only);
thinly cut or sliced up
4 Cloves garlic; minced
1 pound Serrano or prosciutto ham;
in one piece
One half pound Dried white beans
Salt and freshly ground
black pepper
1 cup Thinly cut or sliced up green or white
cabbage
1 cup Fresh green beans snapped
into; halves
1 cup Frozen green peas

In a medium (4 to 6quart) soup pot over low heat, combine olive oil,
onion, leeks and garlic. Saute until onion has softened, about 10 minutes.
Add 9 cups of water, ham, white beans and salt and pepper to taste. Simmer,
covered, until beans are tender, about 2 One half hours.

Add cabbage and green beans. Simmer, covered, for 20 minutes. Add green
peas and continue to simmer for 5 minutes more. Remove and discard ham.
Adjust seasonings and serve.

NOTES : About 80 miles east of Bilbao, across Euskal Herria, as the Basques
call their mountainous region, is Burguete, a town that has long depended
on tourists and is eager for more. There, the region's association with
Hemingway lives on. The novelist stopped at Burguete to fish for
trout...in 1924. And Jake Barnes, the narrator of "The Sun Also Rises,"
goes to Burguete with his friend Bill Gorton before the bullfights. They
stay at an inn about 3000 feet above sea level. Though it's late June, the
lowceilinged, oakpaneled dining room is cold. Bill sits at a piano and
plays to keep warm. "The girl brought in a big bowl of vegetable soup and
the wine," Hemingway wrote... By that slender thread hangs the tourist
trade of the Hostal Burguete, a converted farmhouse. One tour group that
stopped there this fall had mixed feelings about Hemingway, but praised the
soup unanimously. S.A. Belzer, New York Times (reprinted in The
Sacramento Bee January 14, 1998).
Recipe by: adapted from a soup at Hostal Burguete in Spain

Posted to recipeludigest Volume 01 Number 526 by Crane Walden
cranew@foothill.net on Jan 14, 1998