Simple and Cheap: Broccoli Soup

There wasn’t much meat at our table when I was growing up. If we had a piece of meat for dinner it was a small chop or a thin cutlet served as a second course. The first course was usually a soup made of pasta and beans or pasta with broccoli or cauliflower. This was my mother’s strategy for filling your belly a little so you wouldn’t want much meat. She would pull out some of the vegetable that was in the soup and that would be served with the cutlet as part of the second course.

I learned to cook by watching my mother and my grandmother cook. At a young age, I was fascinated with the creative process in the kitchen. The kitchen was a symphony of sound and motion, smell and taste, and all things wonderful came out of my mother’s kitchen. I never saw her use a recipe to cook dinner. Dinner was simple. Ingredients were cheap. There were no cooking shows or fancy cookbooks, or blogs with pictures to show you step-by-step preparations. My grandmother, an Italian immigrant, once told me this story about how she learned to cook back in the early 1900’s.

When I married your grandfather, I didn’t know how to cook. My mother never taught me anything. All she cared about was work. ‘Work and give me your pay,’ she said. I gave her some of my pay and kept the rest. She never knew what I made. My sisters, Mary and Sadie, gave her everything – all their pay. Stupid!

Your grandfather tried to eat the meat I cooked for him one night, but it was so tough he couldn’t chew it. He spit it out, grabbed his hat and went to the door. He said to me, ‘Why did I marry you if you can’t cook?’ and he went out. Can you imagine that? He stayed out all night and came back in the morning.

When he came back, I told him, ‘If you ever do that again - stay out all night - don’t come back here.’ What does he think he can make a fool of me? So he didn’t go out at night anymore and I learned to cook.

I watched the woman in the next apartment. She thinks I’m there to talk and drink coffee, but I watch her clean the broccoli, chop the garlic, fry the chicken cutlets… Soon, I cook better than her.

During the Depression, my grandmother had to return to work all day in a sweat shop so, at the young age of ten, my mother became the “little mother” in the household and was responsible for taking her younger brother to a babysitter before school, cleaning the apartment and preparing dinner every night for the family. She developed her own strategies for precooking and partial cooking so that she could start dinner early and sneak out for an hour to play handball or run down to the beach at Coney Island and still have dinner on the table on time.

One of the soups that we ate a lot, when I was growing up, was a simple broccoli soup with macaroni. It was delicious and cheap and I often make it to this day. It can be partially prepared ahead of time and sit on the stove until the last step, when you are ready to add the pasta – leaving you plenty of time to go out for a few sets of handball or a quick swim at the beach.

Broccoli Soup with Macaroni

Wash a bunch of broccoli. Chop off the bottom two inches of the hard stem and discard. Peel the hard skin off the stems and discard. (It comes off easily if you place your paring knife at the base of the stem, make a tiny cut and just peel it back.) Slice the stems down in halves or quarters to cook the broccoli evenly in water.


To judge how much water to use, place the raw broccoli to a 2 qt. pan and add enough cold water to cover the broccoli completely, plus about another inch or two over.

When you have the adequate amount of water, remove the raw broccoli and bring the water to a boil.

Cook the broccoli a few minutes in the simmering water until the stems are softened enough to break easily with a fork.


Mash the broccoli in the pot with a potato masher or a large fork, leaving some pieces whole. You can stop at this point and when you are ready for dinner bring the water with the cooked broccoli to a boil, again, and add some pasta.



My grandmother gave me a good guide for measuring how much pasta to use. She would break off the edges of spaghetti or linguini into ½ inch pieces and place them in a bowl. Then she would measure one palm full for each person.

My grandmother and my mother did not own measuring cups, so I still measure the pasta this way. Just cup your hand to form a small “vessel” in your palm and use that to measure: for a medium sized head of broccoli I would use about 4 palms full of pasta. You may like your soup thicker, so experiment and use your own judgment.



When the pasta is cooked the soup is ready. Add a tablespoon or so of olive oil to the pot and stir before serving. Season with salt and pepper to taste. You may also make this soup using cauliflower.
















Photos by Tom Vanderberg