Sunday Recipe: Italian Wedding Soup Re-Imagined

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If you aren't Italian and if you didn't grow up in Pittsburgh, you may not even know what Italian Wedding Soup is. It's a sad state of affairs, I know. For the uninitiated, wedding soup is chicken broth, with baby meatballs, greens (usually escarole or spinach) and tiny pasta (generally acini de pepe). But if you you grew up in an Italian family in the Pittsburgh area, you probably had wedding soup at home -- we always had it at Christmas and Easter. I remember that my neighbors, the Polish, German and Slovak ones, didn't eat wedding soup for holidays. Talk about a sad state of affairs.

At some point in the mid-1980's, wedding soup exploded throughout the area and, like the Primanti's sandwich and the pierogi, became one of the hallmark foods of Pittsburgh. [We can only be grateful that they don't race tureens of wedding soup at PNC Park.] Now you can get wedding soup at pretty much any little diner and bar that serves food. It is everywhere. I'm shocked, actually, that Monday Night Football hasn't used wedding soup as their go-to Pittsburgh food image. (If you're not a sports fan, you don't realize that MNF has a gratuitous shot of a local food wherever they are. E.G., in Philly, it's always a cheesesteak; in San Diego, generally they show a fish taco; in Cincy, there is always a lingering shot of Skyline Chili; and in Pittsburgh, it's always, always a Primanti's sandwich. 'They put french fries right. on. the. sandwich!')