Slow-Cooked Broccoli Soup with Garlic and Olive Oil

When I first studied cooking in the 1970s, chefs in France had just started undercooking vegetables so they still had a slight crunch. For years after that it was de rigueur in the United States to serve vegetables practically raw, and the slow- cooked vegetable recipes of the past were—mostly for the best—forgotten.

It wasn’t until I saw a recipe for long-cooked broccoli in Paul Bertholli and Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse Cooking that I began to experiment with some of these o