Last week I was at Walmart and I always check the soup aisle to see if Campbell’s Chunky if on sale. If it’s $2 or less, I go and buy a couple of cans. It’s this type of thrifty behaviour that’s allowed me to save tens of dollars over the years. Anyways, next to the cans of Chunky were the normal cans of soup, including Italian wedding. Despite knowing about this type of soups for years, I’ve never had it. I just thought it was because I hadn’t been invited to the right Italian wedding.
It turns out that Italian wedding soup did not become popular because it was a soup that was always served at… Italian weddings. The name came about because of a botched translation to English from Italian. The more proper term would be “married soup” due to the delicious bond of green vegetables and meats in the soup.
Now that we got that out of the way, I can tell you how I liked Campbell’s interpretation of the soup. It was simply delicious. The chicken broth was clean and not too salty. In general, I really like soups with chicken broth. The combination of spinach, beef meatballs, and the acini pasta is what makes the soup so good. It’s a marriage made in culinary heaven, if you could marry three ingredients that is. In particular, I quite enjoyed the spinach and the pasta. I thought the spinach might be relegated to a goopy mess as it sat in a soup can but it still had some texture to it. I love pasta, especially when it’s in a form that’s close to rice, like orzo. The acini wasn’t too cooked, so I didn’t feel like I was eating a soft paste.
Not sure why I waited so long to try Italian wedding but I bought two more cans this weekend. I also keep hearing this thing called “lasagna” is pretty good as well.