It is winter in Melbourne and time to cook Iota again.
Smoked pork, sauerkraut, borlotti beans? Italian you say?
Yes, and it demonstrates just how regional Italian cuisine can be.
Iota is an extremely hearty soup from Trieste, the city where I grew up as a child until I came to Australia.
Details and recipe for Iota (A Very Thick Soup From Trieste)
See also Gulasch (Goulash As Made in Trieste)
For a complete meal, end the one course Iota dish with a salad or two.
Popular in Trieste:
Matovilc, see: Salad Green: Matovilc, Also Called Lamb’s Lettuce and Mâche
or Radicchio Triestino, a small-soft-leaf radicchio.
My father grew Radicchio Triestino in his Adelaide garden but I have never seen it for sale in Australia.
These are some of the salad vegetables I am able to purchase at the Queen Victoria Market. Notice the pale coloured beetroot (I also cook the leaves like spinach). The beetroot I ate in Trieste was always pale in colour.
Next to the red radicchio is the head of speckled, pale radicchio (radicchio biondo= blonde/blond).
Fennel and the baby cabbage are also suitable salad vegetables, as is rocket – rucola in Triestine.
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