Zuppa di Valpelline (Seupa à la Valpellinentze)

A warming winter soup from the alpine region of Valle d'Aosta. The perfect comfort food after a day spent in the mountains.

Comforting childhood memories of very cold winter days and warm cheesy soup dinners. This is my way to use some stale bread up.

This traditional soup comes from the valley of Valpelline in the region of Valle d’Aosta. Nowadays, it’s commonly called also zuppa alla valdostana as it’s made widely in the region. If you visit or have visited the Valley of Cogne, they have their own variant with rice instead of the savoy cabbage.

When I have some bread going stale, I slice it and keep it in a paper bag for this simple and tasty soup.

Ingredients:

Serve 4

• 1.5 litres of good quality meat or vegetable stock.

• 400g of Fontina cheese or any other strong flavoured, melting cheese like Raclette, Beaufort, Pitchfork/Montgomery’s/Isle of Mull cheddar, etc finely sliced.

• 500/700g of sliced rye or wholemeal bread. White bread can be used, but it must be a sourdough or a bread with a dense structure.

• 1 small savoy cabbage

• a knob of butter

• 1 cinnamom stick, ground nutmeg, ground black pepper

• 2 or 3 star anise

Method:

Turn the oven on at 190℃ ventilated or 200℃ static.

Bring the stock to the boil, then add the savoy cabbage leaves separated. Boil them for 2/3 min, then keep them aside.

Butter generously an oven dish.

Make a layer of bread, then a layer of cabbage and over it a layer of fontina.

If you don’t have stale bread, you can toast some instead.

Add a piece of the cinnamon stick, 1 star anise, some ground nutmeg and some ground black pepper. In the photos below you can see I used juniper berries in place of the star anise.

Continue with another layer of bread, then cabbage and Fontina cheese to finish.

Scatter the rest of the spices on top and slowly pour the stock all over the top so it can enter inside the layers.

Cook the soup for 30min. in the oven until the cheese is melted and slightly brown on top.

Terracotta dishes are ideal for this recipe

Wine pairing suggested by James MacNay, IWA:

This rich, warming soup from Italy’s high Alps requests an earthy, spicy red. If you wanted to go off-piste, you could seek out a Tuscan Sangiovese - a Chianti, perhaps; but if you want to stay on the local slopes then I’d choose Lo Triolet’s Côteau Barrage, a Valle d’Aosta DOC wine made with 80% Syrah and 20% Fumin.

(See Cinzia’s Gnocchi alla Bava recipe on 12/12/24 for a note on this regional grape.)

Gnocchi alla Bava

Côteau Barrage spends 9 months in barrique and is warming, soft and peppery (that’s the Syrah) with a red fruit-and-smoke note (courtesy of the Fumin).

In November we visited the centuries-old tasting room with a group of travellers who were instantly besotted. If you can’t find this wine in the UK then get in touch and we will bring some in with our next order.