Jota Triestina

The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn't exist. There are Venetian cooking, Neapolitan cooking, Bolognese cooking. And then there is Triestine cooking, which confounds even this understanding.

Jota comes from Trieste, that peculiar city wedged between the Adriatic and Slovenia, a place that belonged to Austria for centuries and still cooks like it remembers. You will find sauerkraut here, which no Roman would recognize. You will find beans cooked with smoked pork in a style that owes more to Ljubljana than to Milan. This is not a corruption of Italian cooking. It is Italian cooking, as it exists in this particular place.

The dish requires patience. The beans must be cooked until they begin to fall apart. The sauerkraut must simmer until its sharpness mellows. The smoked pork must give up its fat to enrich the broth. Everything comes together at the end, and some of the beans are mashed against the side of the pot to thicken the soup into something between a broth and a stew. Simple does not mean easy.