Ingredients: Rice, turnips, butter, gravy, tomatoes.
Cut three or four young turnips into slices and put them on a dish, strew a little salt over them, cover them with another dish, and let them stand for about two hours until the water has run out of them. Then drain the slices, put them in a frying-pan and fry them slightly in butter. Add some good gravy and mashed-up tomatoes, and after having cooked this for a few minutes pour it into good boiling stock. Add three ounces of well-washed rice, and boil for half-an-hour.
Minestra loses its flavour if it is boiled too long. In Lombardy, however, rice, macaroni, &c., are rarely boiled enough for English tastes.
See also: Wikipedia Cookbook.
Source: The Cook's Decameron: A Study In Taste, Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes from a project that puts out-of-copyright texts into the public domain. This is from a *very* old source, and reflects the cooking at the turn of the last century. Update as necessary.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump