Etruscan Chestnut and Chickpea Soup
Amber Guinness · Winter in the Highlands
My friend Niccolò introduced me to this dish. It’s his favourite soup, and he loves it so much he buys jars of it from his old neighbouring farm in Chianti and eats it straight from the jar. I love how this dish brings together two quintessentially Tuscan ingredients, chestnuts and chickpeas, both of which have been grown around us at Arniano for thousands of years since the time of the ancient Etruscans. Traditional recipes call for soaking dried chickpeas and roasting the chestnuts, but for ease, I use ready-cooked chestnuts and tinned chickpeas, though of course you can soak and cook the chickpeas. If you do, retain the soaking water for the soup and substitute it for half the stock.
If you would like the dish to be even more substantial, add a couple of handfuls of pasta, such as filini, ditalini, broken-up spaghetti or, if you can get it, gramigna – small curled pasta tubes that are traditional in this soup but hard to find.
