Sauerkraut and Barley Soup

Jota was once the staple daily diet of the inhabitants of the Carso mountain villages around the lovely city of Trieste. This was an area where genuine hunger and poverty was a reality until very recently. A book published in 1898, called Guida alla Carnia, tells of how, in an enormous area covering most of the mountain and its valleys, Jota was almost all there was to eat.

There are countless versions of this soup - with meat and without, with barley or with beans or both - but the