Instant Pot Olive Garden Zuppa Toscana Copycat

The winter of 1315 was the coldest in living memory across Tuscany. The grain harvests had failed across three consecutive seasons, and the city of Florence sent foraging parties into the countryside to document what the peasants were eating — not from compassion, but from a desire to understand survival. The Florentine clerk Rinaldo di Bardi wrote in his field notes of a soup he encountered in a farmhouse outside Greve, prepared by a woman of approximately sixty years who had, by her own account, not left her valley in a decade. The soup contained sausage — specifically the spiced pork sausage the Tuscans had been making since Roman times — along with the wild kale that grew along stream banks, potatoes brought north by Spanish traders a generation earlier, and a broth thickened with cream skimmed from the household's single cow. It was, di Bardi wrote, the most complete food I have encountered in my travels, requiring nothing alongside it and leaving nothing wanting after. The recipe survived in the margins of di Bardi's field notes, rediscovered by a food historian at the Biblioteca Nazionale in 1962. It entered the American consciousness through the Olive Garden restaurant chain, which is perhaps the least dignified vector imaginable for a dish of this historical weight — but the Instant Pot version, prepared in under thirty minutes, restores something of its original character: a meal that requires very little and gives back everything.