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It’s a wildly popular item to be served at Italian-American wedding receptions, especially in the North Eastern United States, and most specifically the Pennsylvania/ New Jersey areas. It is most popular in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania where it is almost always fed to a new bride and groom and said to be “energy fortification” to help them through their first night together. How romantic.  So that’s why it is called Italian wedding soup, right? Well, no. It is sort of the other way around and became a wedding tradition seemingly because of its name. The name is a mistranslation of “minestra maritata” (married soup). The Italians use this term to describe how well vegetables and grains go together in a soup. It’s a good “marriage” of ingredients. In some parts of Italy the traditional soup contains meat and in others it does not. There are no hard rules as to what greens are used and the grains can take the form of a small pasta, long noodles or even beans. The meat in the soup also varies, sometimes being pork, chicken, beef, or more recently meatballs. So Italian wedding soup can take on many different forms, and people from different traditions or who have lived in different parts of the country have different concepts of what Italian wedding soup should be.

This recipe will be dealing with the North Eastern United States concept of the soup. There are many variables and I will be pointing some of them out, but this recipe makes an amazing Italian wedding soup any Italian-American cook would be proud to serve.

Using a few premade ingredients this soup can be prepared in about 20 minutes, or if you want to make it completely from scratch it can take many hours. The choice is yours. It merely depends on the time you are able or willing to spend on making it. This recipe makes approximately 2 liters ( around 6 servings) worth of soup.

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So you want chocolate pudding, and you want to be liberated from the boxes and plastic tubs. You want to make it right. You have made a wise decision my friend. While prepackaged pudding and pudding mixes can be delicious, nothing compares to fresh homemade pudding. Also, I have good news for you! It’s so quick and easy to make it from scratch, you’ll wonder why you never tried it before (that is, of course, IF you have never tried it before).

This recipe makes a thick, smooth, and delightfully creamy chocolate pudding that can be eaten warm right out of the pot, chilled, as a pie filling for chocolate pudding pie, or in any recipe that calls for chocolate pudding.

The following recipe took me about 10 minutes to make, including the time it took to take all the pictures of the ingredients, so trust me when I say it’s FAST! This recipe makes a little over 2 cups of pudding which can be portioned in any way you choose, and it’s just enough to fill an approximately 8×8 inch pie crust.