Italian American Wedding Soup

Big life events can change people—and recipes. Italian wedding soup, as it's made in Italy, overflows with multiple cuts of meat layered with 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 ties to the land and its agricultural products. The meats may not be the priciest cuts, but they're generous to the point of gratuitousness, and they're delicious.

But the dish took on a new form when Italians immigrated to the States. The original's embarrassment of meats got pared down to little tasty meatballs bobbing in a broth, the heaps of vegetables a more restrained pot full of simmered spinach or another leafy green, along with some basic aromatic vegetables. Those are the kinds of changes people make when they can’t get their hands on specialty imported products in a new land—and often couldn’t afford them even if they could. Ground meat, though, stretched with bread for meatballs? That's doable, and no one's going to complain about meatballs.

Today, the soup known as Italian wedding soup in the US shares little with its ancestor beyond a brothy base of meat and vegetables. That, in fact, is the marriage being 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 soulful. But it's also a lot more work. The Americanized version here wins on the convenience-to-flavor payoff, offering a warming, satisfying one-bowl meal that checks all the boxes and delivers more than enough deliciousness.

There are a few keys to building flavor in this soup, and I'd argue it starts with the broth, which is made from a base of chicken stock and lightly sautéed vegetables. Use homemade stock if you can; it will push the soup much farther ahead in the flavor department before you add much extra. Store-bought stock can, of course, work, but its boxed-stock flavor will come 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-parts mix of ground beef and pork: beef for its richness, pork for a more tender texture. If you can get a ground meatball mixture that also contains veal, your meatballs will be even more tender and juicy.

In many of my prior meatball recipes, I've been adamant that the better approach is to use a panade made from bread soaked in a liquid like milk, which delivers a much softer texture with welcome added moisture. Here, though, I opt for the convenience of breadcrumbs. They make meatballs that are denser and drier, but since they'll end up in the brothy soup, it doesn't matter as much—the meatballs will soak up broth in the pot and the bowl.

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

One last note: If you use spinach for this, please try to get mature spinach, not baby spinach, which has become ubiquitous. Mature spinach retains more texture when cooked and doesn't cross over into the damp, slimy, disintegrating wisps that baby spinach does. If baby spinach is all you can find, 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 big as marrying greens to meat, you may as well pick the ones that are up to the commitment.