The past few years have brought us several viral soups. There was New Yorker writer Helen Rosner's "Roberto," a soup that she developed now nine or ten years ago, made by "sautéing some onion and garlic with a few links of spicy Italian sausage, dumping in a can of white beans and a can of crushed tomatoes, adding a few cups of chicken stock, and stirring in a fistful of torn kale."
"The result was good, but not quite good enough, so in went a flurry of grated Parmesan, for savory depth, and a shower of lemon juice, to lend some tart, shimmery brightness," Rosner wrote for the New Yorker in January 2020. "Almost no individual element of this was original—beans and greens have been the stuff of dinner since beans and greens began—and yet the gestalt had something to it, something unexpectedly right."
