Rosa Mastrangelo made sausage tortellini soup for me on my second night in her house, at ten at night, in a quilted housecoat the colour of weak tea. My flight into Toronto had sat on the tarmac for two hours and I had arrived with a face she did not like the look of.
She said I looked grey. I did not argue.
The Kitchen on Corso Italia Where I First Had Sausage Tortellini Soup
Rosa rents two rooms on the upper floor of a narrow brick house off St. Clair West, in the stretch everyone there still calls Corso Italia. Her kitchen has mustard-yellow tiles, a wall calendar from a funeral home, and a pot with a dent in one side that she will not replace.
Her parents came over from Modena in the late fifties. She has never lived in Italy, she told me twice, so do not go calling her soup Italian.
I stood at her elbow and watched her drop a pound of loose sausage into the dry hot pot and then do nothing at all. When I reached in with the spoon she put her hand flat over mine and said leave it. Three minutes of nothing, she said, is where the whole flavour comes from. Then she crumbled it, let the pieces go properly brown and crusty at the edges, and lifted the meat out before the vegetables went in.
She corrected me twice more that night. Once for wanting to add the tortellini early, and once for grating the cheese into a boiling pot.
What Rosa’s Butcher Told Me About the Salsiccia
The next morning she sent me three doors down for sausage, and I ended up at the counter for twenty minutes behind a woman buying veal for a christening.
The butcher, Dino, talked the entire time. He said the sausage should be shoulder, nothing leaner, roughly a third fat, and ground coarse so the pieces stay as pieces in the pan. Anything finer turns pasty in liquid and you lose the texture that makes this a meal rather than a broth.
He also told me the salt goes in the day before and the meat rests overnight in the fridge before it is cased, which is why good salsiccia holds together instead of weeping grey water when it hits heat. I had never thought about the resting part. I think about it now every time I buy sausage, which is often, usually at the Italian deli near the farmers’ market where the guy weighs it with his thumb on the paper.
Why This Is Not the Tortellini Soup of Bologna
I came home and read about it properly, because I had assumed this was a village dish and it is not. Tortellini itself is genuinely old and genuinely Emilian, documented in Bologna and Modena with accounts of the shape going back to the 1100s and written recipes by the 14th century, plus the story that an innkeeper at Castelfranco Emilia glimpsed Venus through a keyhole and modelled the ring on her navel.
But in Emilia-Romagna, tortellini soup means tortellini in brodo. A small number of tortellini floated in clear capon broth, nothing else. The recipe was deposited with the Bologna Chamber of Commerce on 7 December 1974 and is watched over by the Dotta Confraternita del Tortellino, and the filling in those is pork, prosciutto, mortadella and Parmigiano, not cheese.
Sausage tortellini soup is the North American descendant. Immigrant cooks and their children took the prestigious pasta, let go of the capon broth and the hand-rolled dough, and rebuilt it around refrigerated supermarket tortellini into something that feeds six people as a main course. It is not zuppa toscana, which uses potatoes and no pasta. It is not Italian wedding soup either, which runs on tiny meatballs and small shapes.
Rosa was right about her own soup. It is hers, and it is Corso Italia, and it is not Modena.
What I Used
- Olive oil, a tablespoon, just to get the pot going
- A pound of bulk Italian sausage, casings off if you bought links
- One yellow onion, two celery stalks, one big carrot, all chopped small
- Four cloves of garlic, minced
- Two tablespoons of tomato paste
- Dried Italian seasoning, about a teaspoon and a half
- Half a teaspoon of fennel seed, crushed under the flat of the knife
- Red pepper flakes, half a teaspoon, more if your sausage is sweet
- Half a cup of dry red wine, optional, Sangiovese or Chianti
- A 28 ounce can of crushed tomatoes
- Six cups of low sodium chicken broth
- Twenty ounces of refrigerated cheese tortellini, not the dried shelf-stable stuff
- Three quarters of a cup of heavy cream
- Five ounces of baby spinach, or Tuscan kale if that is what you have
- A cup of finely grated Parmigiano-Reggiano, plus more at the table
- Salt and plenty of black pepper
Cooking Sausage Tortellini Soup Without Wrecking the Pasta
This is an easy soup with two or three places where people quietly ruin it, and I have ruined it at every one of them.
The first is the browning. Seven to ten minutes, and the sausage should be a little crusty, not just cooked through. My Dutch oven has a chipped lid and a wide base, which is the only thing that matters here, because a crowded pot steams the meat instead of searing it.
The second is the fat. I pour off almost all of it and keep about a tablespoon, then the soffritto goes in with a pinch of salt and pulls up all the browned bits as the vegetables release their moisture. Twenty minutes of simmering after the tomatoes and broth go in, and then you taste. The broth should taste of pork. If it tastes of carton, give it another ten.
The third is the tortellini, and this is the one that counts. Four minutes. The first time I made it I dumped the pasta in at the start along with the broth and let the whole thing go for half an hour, and what I served was split rings leaking ricotta into pink sludge. Humbling.
Cream and spinach go in off the heat, then the Parmigiano off the heat too so it melts smooth instead of stringing into ropes. I made it on a Sunday afternoon in January with rain hitting the kitchen window, which is the correct weather for it.
Swaps and Small Changes
Hot sausage plus the full half teaspoon of flakes makes a properly spicy pot, so use sweet sausage and skip the flakes if that is not your thing. Kale instead of spinach works, in two minutes before the pasta is done rather than after. I always use the wine. Except on weeknights, which is most of the time, and nobody has ever noticed.
If you are making it ahead, boil the tortellini separately and spoon it into each bowl. Pasta sitting in broth overnight swells to twice the size and splits at the seams.
Rosa writes to me at Christmas and signs off with her last name, formally, as if we had met at a bank. I have made this soup maybe fifteen times since that night and it still tastes like her yellow tiles. Next trip up I am bringing her something from my own kitchen, if I can work out what.
Sausage Tortellini Soup
Ingredients
Equipment
Method
- Heat the olive oil in a Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the sausage and break it into rough chunks with a wooden spoon. Let it sit undisturbed for 3 minutes to take on color, then crumble and stir and keep cooking 7 to 10 minutes total, until the pieces are deeply browned and a little crusty. This browning is the whole flavor of the soup, so do not rush it.
- Lift the sausage out with a slotted spoon onto a plate. Pour off the rendered fat, leaving about 1 tablespoon in the pot.
- Add the onion, celery and carrot to the pot with a pinch of salt. Cook over medium heat for 5 minutes, scraping up the browned bits from the bottom as the vegetables release moisture, until softened but not browned.
- Add the garlic, tomato paste, Italian seasoning, fennel seed and red pepper flakes. Cook 1 minute, stirring constantly, until the paste darkens a shade and the herbs smell fragrant.
- Pour in the wine, if using, and scrape the base of the pot clean. Simmer 2 minutes until the sharp alcohol smell is gone.
- Add the crushed tomatoes, chicken broth and the browned sausage along with any juices on the plate. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a gentle simmer and cook uncovered for 20 minutes. Taste it now: the broth should taste of pork and tomato, not of raw stock. Season with the salt and black pepper.
- Raise the heat to a steady simmer and add the tortellini. Cook just 3 to 5 minutes, following the package time, until the pasta is tender and floats. Do not let it go longer or the seams split and the filling leaks into the broth.
- Pull the pot off the heat. Stir in the heavy cream and the spinach; the residual heat will wilt the greens in under a minute. If using kale, stir it in 2 minutes before the tortellini is done instead.
- Stir in the grated Parmigiano-Reggiano off the heat so it melts smoothly without stringing. Taste and adjust salt and pepper.
- Ladle into warm bowls right away and finish each with more grated Parmigiano and a grind of black pepper.