kitchen. “My mother is a big believer in soup,” she explains. When
DePalma was growing up, her mother kept up the Italian tradition
of having primi (a first course, usually a pasta) at every meal.
“Two or three days a week, there’d be soup. You never got away
from soup; it could be a hundred degrees outside, and Mom would
serve a hundred-fifty-degree boiling soup.”
As DePalma dealt with the aftereffects of her chemo, her
mother “would shovel soup down [her] throat.” One of these
soups was her mother’s lentil soup, which her mother would make
on Friday nights, even after Vatican II and the Congress of
Cardinals in the 1960s declared that Catholics didn’t have to
abstain from eating meat on Fridays. “According to my mother,
we still can’t have meat on Fridays,” she says, laughing.
It’s a riff on that very soup that DePalma makes for me in her
kitchen when we start cooking together. Her version isn’t one she
could serve to her mother on a Friday, given that it contains Italian
sausage. It also includes the classic Italian trifecta—onions,
carrots, and celery—and Swiss chard. At the end, DePalma
employs a fascinating technique: she slivers garlic, sizzles it in oil,
and adds that to the finished soup, along with some grated
Pecorino, to give it an extra kick of flavor.
This is a wonderfully rich and comforting soup, the kind you’d
want to hover over on a freezing-cold day or, as intended, while
recovering from an illness. The other dishes DePalma makes—a
pungent bagna cauda (with lots of garlic and anchovies) and a
lemon semifreddo with blackberries—are foods to eat when you’re