As you can tell from the name, Valpellinese Soup originates from a small town in the Aosta Valley called Valpelline. It’s a very flavorful dish, perfect for warming up during winter evenings, with stale bread, fontina cheese, and broth as its main ingredients. As with many recipes, everyone has their version, in the original one rye bread was used, a little cinnamon was added to flavor the broth, and in some versions, some lard was added between the layers of ingredients to make it even richer. Today I present my version where I used wholemeal croutons instead of stale bread, but of course, you can use whatever dry bread you have at home.

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Difficulty: Easy
Cost: Economical
Preparation time: 40 Minutes
Portions: 6 People
Cooking methods: Oven
Cuisine: Italian
Seasonality: Autumn, Winter, All Seasons

Ingredients

21 oz cabbage (a small cabbage)
9 oz fontina cheese
2.5 cups vegetable broth
2 pinches coarse salt
to taste olive oil
to taste black pepper (ground)
to taste ground cinnamon (optional)
2 oz lard (optional)
10 bread croutons (wholemeal about 0.4 oz each or slices of stale bread)

Steps

Start by cleaning and washing the cabbage: remove the harder core and any outer leaves if they’re somewhat wilted. Now put a little water in a pot and once it boils, add the coarse salt and the cabbage leaves. Cook them for a few minutes, they should remain crunchy, not too soft.
Drain them in a colander, laying them spread out all around the edges.
Now take a baking dish with a diameter of about 10 inches, line it with parchment paper, lightly oil the bottom, and make a first layer with the cabbage leaves, using a bit less than half of the leaves on top of each other. Lightly salt and pepper.
Now place the stale bread on top, I used wholemeal croutons, but you can use any bread you have at home, as long as it’s quite hard. You can also toast it in the oven first to make it more crunchy and flavorful.
At this point, make a layer of fontina cheese sliced not too thinly, using about half of the amount.
Add another layer of cabbage leaves, finish with the remaining ones, and season with a little oil and pepper.
Finish everything with another layer of fontina, using all that you have left. To add flavor, if you like, you can add small pieces of lard before covering the surface with the fontina. Now add the broth, either meat or vegetable, depending on your taste, to which you have added a little cinnamon, if you like.
Bake by placing the dish at the bottom of the oven at 356°F for about 25 minutes. Make sure the broth doesn’t dry out too much, otherwise, the bottom might burn.
Brown the top and enjoy it hot!