Italian Wedding Soup

Niagara Falls being a tourist area offers ample dining attractions.  We ate at East Side Mario's on Fallsview Ave in Niagara Falls during our recent visit.   East Side Mario's is a chain restaurant featuring Italian cuisine.  The average entrée costs under $20 but includes soup or salad (all you can eat) as well as fresh baked bread.  The atmosphere is quite lovely.  During our visit we found the food to be average and the service lacking.

My husband ordered the Italian wedding soup rather than salad as a starter.  Italian wedding soup is an Italian-American consisting of green vegetables, meat and pasta, quite often spinach, endive, escarole, cabbage, lettuce, or kale in a chicken based broth.  It is popular in the United States.  The meat is usually in the form of small meatballs.


The term wedding soup is derived from the mistransation of minestra mariata, the term for married soup.  However, the term married soup actually means green vegetables and meat go well together.  There are ready-to-serve cans of Italian wedding soup on the market but in all honesty, this is an extremely easy soup to make from scratch.  The soup does freeze nicely and if you are a home canner, it could be canned for convenience without all the added preservatives as well as believe it or not high fructose corn syrup.