Sopa de Funcho

Name: Sopa de Funcho
Prep time: 20 min
Cook time: 1 h 20 min
Total time: 1 h 40 min
Yield: 6
Cuisine: São Miguel & the Azores
Ingredients: 200 g dried white or red kidney beans, soaked overnight; 400 g wild fennel fronds and tender stems, or the tops of 4 bulbs plus a large bunch of dill; 600 g floury potatoes, in 2cm cubes; 2 onions, chopped; 4 garlic cloves, sliced; 200 g streaky pork belly or chouriço, in small pieces; 4 tbsp olive oil; 2 litres water; 1 tsp sweet pimentão; 2 tsp salt, or to taste; 1 tsp freshly ground black pepper; 6 slices day-old bread, to serve

the Azorean fennel soup of São Miguel: wild fennel, potato and beans cooked with a little pork into something between a broth and a stew

Origin: São Miguel & the Azores

From the journey of Fennel.

Fennel went into the Atlantic with Portuguese settlement in the fifteenth century and took to the islands completely. It grows wild across the Azores and Madeira now, on roadsides and volcanic slopes, and the word is embedded in the map: Funchal, the capital of Madeira, is named for it, the first settlers having found the hillside above the bay covered in funcho when they landed in the 1420s. São Miguel turned it into soup. Sopa de funcho is wild fennel cooked slowly with potato, dried beans, and a little pork or chouriço, and it sits somewhere between a broth and a stew, thickened by the potato breaking down rather than by anything added. It is a soup of a farming island rather than a fishing one, and it belongs to the Espírito Santo festivals of the Azorean spring as much as to the everyday table. The technique that matters is a two-stage one. Wild fennel is stronger and more bitter than the cultivated kind, so it is blanched first and that water thrown away; the fennel then goes into the soup proper. Skipping the blanch gives a soup with an aggressive edge that Azorean cooks would consider a mistake, and the same instruction turns up wherever the wild plant is cooked in quantity. There is a loose end in the botany worth mentioning here of all places. Florence fennel, the bulb variety, carries the botanical epithet azoricum, meaning of the Azores, and it did not come from the Azores; it was selected in Italy. It appears to be one of those eighteenth-century names that records where a European naturalist happened to meet a plant rather than where it grew up, and it is a cheerful piece of misdirection to find attached to an island that does have a genuine fennel tradition of its own.

Ingredients

Beans

200 g dried white or red kidney beans, soaked overnight

Fennel

400 g wild fennel fronds and tender stems, or the tops of 4 bulbs plus a large bunch of dill

Vegetables

600 g floury potatoes, in 2cm cubes
2 onions, chopped
4 garlic cloves, sliced

Meat

200 g streaky pork belly or chouriço, in small pieces

To cook

4 tbsp olive oil
2 litres water

Seasoning

1 tsp sweet pimentão
2 tsp salt, or to taste
1 tsp freshly ground black pepper

To serve

6 slices day-old bread, to serve

Method

Drain the soaked beans, cover them with fresh water, and simmer for forty-five minutes to an hour until tender. Salt them only once soft.
Meanwhile, blanch the fennel. Bring a large pan of water to the boil, add the chopped fronds and stems, and boil hard for five minutes.
Drain the fennel and throw that water away. Wild fennel is markedly more bitter than the cultivated kind, and this step is what makes the soup taste sweet rather than sharp.
Warm the olive oil in a large pot and fry the pork or chouriço until the fat runs and the edges colour.
Add the onions and garlic and cook for ten minutes until soft and golden.
Stir in the pimentão off the heat for a few seconds so it does not catch, then return the pot to the heat.
Add the potatoes, the blanched fennel, the two litres of water, salt, and pepper, and bring to a simmer.
Cook uncovered for thirty minutes, until the potatoes are soft enough to break up against the side of the pot with a spoon.
Crush about a third of the potatoes against the side and stir them back in. This is what thickens the soup, and no flour or cream is used.
Add the cooked beans with a ladleful of their liquid and simmer for a further ten minutes so everything comes together.
Taste for salt, which a bean and potato soup will take more of than expected.
Serve very hot over a slice of day-old bread in the bottom of each bowl, with a thread of olive oil poured over.

Notes

Blanch the wild fennel and discard that water, which is the one step that decides whether the soup is sweet or bitter. If you are using the fronds from cultivated bulbs, the blanch is less critical but still worth doing. Crush some of the potato to thicken rather than adding anything, which is how Portuguese soups of this family are built. Chouriço gives more flavour than plain pork belly and is what most Azorean households use. The soup is better the next day and thickens considerably as it stands, so keep some of the bean liquid back to loosen it.

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Journey Point Map Key

Ingredient originTrade or transit route

Became a culinary stapleColonial / trade control