Jota Triestina

Jota is the emblematic soup of Trieste and reflects the city's long history at the edge of Friuli and within the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Italian, Slovenian and Mitteleuropean foodways overlapped. The name is generally traced to the late Latin iutta or jutta, meaning broth or gruel, a root that points to the dish having spread from Friuli eastward and southward. It is a frugal peasant soup of preserved and stored winter staples — fermented cabbage or turnip, dried beans and pork — and is claimed as a regional pride in Trieste, the Slovenian Littoral, Gorizia and Istria alike. Because an identically named jota is documented in Slovenian cuisine, the qualifier Triestina distinguishes the Trieste rendering.

Jota arrives dense and almost stewy rather than brothy, a muted brown-grey from the sauerkraut and roux. The first taste is the soft tang of fermented cabbage cut by the starch of broken-down beans and potato; smoked pork runs underneath as a savory, slightly fatty backbone. The texture is thick and spoon-coating, the beans partly collapsed into the body of the soup. Good jota is balanced and rounded after resting overnight; a rushed one tastes sharply, one-dimensionally sour, with the sauerkraut and beans not yet melded.

Two preservation processes carry the flavor. Sauerkraut and brovada are both lactic fermentations: bacteria turn the sugars of cabbage or turnip into lactic acid, which both preserves the vegetable and gives the soup its characteristic sour edge. The beans are cooked until some break down, releasing starch that thickens the liquid, while the pestà — flour toasted in oil with garlic until brown — adds both a roux's thickening and a faint roasted, Maillard depth. Long, slow simmering and an overnight rest let the acid, starch, smoke and fat diffuse and mellow into each other, which is why the soup is considered better reheated the next day.