Soups from the Mediterranean

Paparòt is an interesting spinach soup from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the region of northeastern Italy, and is far more exciting than its humble list of ingredients would indicate. It’s a spinach soup made with fine cornmeal flour used as a thickening agent. Paparòt, in the dialect of Friuli, means “pulped” used as a noun (in other words “pulped soup”) and indicates that the spinach is treated like a pesto but is pulped by chopping rather than pounding in a mortar. The kind of cornmeal to use is the one used for polenta, and I prefer the slightly coarser one because I enjoy the resulting gruel-like texture. The taste is surprisingly rich and filling.

The recipe is in my latest book THE BEST SOUPS IN THE WORLD

Is Polenta the Same Thing as Grits?

No. Grits is made from ground hominy with the germ removed (germ is the embryo with the scutellum of a cereal grain that is separated from the starchy endosperm during milling). Hominy is made by soaking corn kernals in a caustic solution (lye) that removes the hull. Polenta can be made from a variety of grains such sorghum, wheat, or millet, but typically refers to that made from cornmeal, "meal" meaning coarsely ground grain.