Mangiafagioli

“What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s a sure thing in a world where nothing is sure…”

--Nora Ephron, Heartburn

I went to Venice last weekend. It was… I don’t have words. Or rather, I have too many words, and it’s going to take me some time to figure out which ones I want to use, so I’m afraid those of you reading this will have to be patient in waiting for the post(s) on La Serenissima. But it was amazing.

I left in a hurry on Friday, after school and a thoroughly delightful but longer-than-planned farewell lunch for a classmate. (Note to self: aperitivo + gnocchi + hot afternoon sunshine on Piazza Brà = a sluggish Buongustaia.) Starting with the mad dash from my apartment to the Verona train station, and ending with the mad dash through inscrutable Venetian alleyways to catch the last train home, the weekend was a nonstop blur of activity. I will spare you the lamentations for my poor, achy, blistered little feet, because the weekend was worth every blister! I had school Monday morning, of course, and after class, I was still groggy and sore. No energy to go out about town, and besides, I had things to do at home. The day was cool and overcast—almost no sunshine. Best way to fight the cloudy-day blues and post-travel fatigue? Cook!

One of my favorite cool-weather comfort foods is pasta e fagioli—pasta and beans. It’s warm and nourishing and soothing, like all the best soups, but it’s not quite a soup. When I had it in Rome it was beans and noodles and vegetables in a clear broth, soup-like, but in Northern Italy it’s more like a porridge, with the beans mashed, or simply cooked to the point of dissolution, to thicken the broth. In fact, the more I see of this dish in the North—both Tuscany and the Veneto claim it as their own—the more I think that the Roman version was gussied up for restaurant service, and not at all a typical preparation. But it was still delicious.

Borlotti are the beans traditionally used for this dish; in the US, cranberry beans make a fine substitute (they are similarly colored, white with rosy mottling). Pinto beans work in a pinch—I like them better than either cannellini or kidney beans, for color and texture—or you can use chickpeas and call it pasta e ceci. I actually already had a can of borlotti beans in the cupboard, thinking that, as the weather turned cooler, I might want to make this. But when I went to the vegetable market, they had fresh borlotti, and since they are in season, how could I pass them up?

I hadn’t been to the vegetable stalls in several days, since I needed to use up the produce I already had before leaving to Venice. It was, as always, fun and informative. I started with the carrots. The vendor bustled over and swatted my hands away. I was surprised, because normally customers are allowed to select their own vegetables. But she said, “Wait a minute—these carrots are no good. Let me get them out of the way for you.” She picked through the bin and selected half a dozen cracked or limp carrots, which she then laid to the side, and said, “There you go. Those others were ugly. These are beautiful. Go on, pick the ones you want.” So I did. And then I reached toward the celery: sturdy bunches with full heads of thick, dark green leaves. “You’re making a broth?” asked the vendor. I nodded, and she snapped two crisp stalks off at the root end and put them in the bag with the carrots. (This is totally brilliant, because while I like celery I don’t use it in that many things, and when I have to buy a whole bundle invariably it goes bad before I can use it all. Buying by the stalk is really ideal. Why don’t American grocers let you do that?) Next, “You need some onion.” This was not a question. “Red, white? How many?” “One white, please.” Garlic, or anything else? No, I had all that at home.



Pasta e fagioli is very easy to make, although it can be time-consuming. I usually make one of three versions: very slow, very fast, or not-too-slow.

The very slow version simply means that I start with dried beans and soak them and boil them. It takes hours, but then you get a bean broth, and it’s much tastier than canned beans. If I’m in a SlowFood mood, I also use homemade broth and (as I had it in Rome) scraps of fresh pasta dough instead of dried noodles.

The very fast version goes like this: Heat up some broth (chicken or veg, depending on your persuasion). Boil pasta in it. Whatever kind of pasta you have on hand. Smaller, shorter is better. If all you have is spaghetti or other noodles, just break them into little bits. When the pasta is cooked, add canned beans that have been rinsed and drained. Simmer a couple minutes until it’s all heated through, then season with salt and pepper, serve with a little olive oil and parmesan on top. It's a pale imitation of the real thing, but it’s still very tasty, and a great quick supper—takes barely 15 minutes, and I nearly always have the ingredients on hand.

The not-so-fast version makes a concession to the use of canned beans, and takes a little more patience than the fast-food version, but is more delicious and satisfying:

Start with a soffritto of onion, carrot, celery, and a couple cloves of garlic. There should also be herbs; at home I might use thyme, oregano and/or bay leaf, but since I didn't have any of that on hand I just used the celery leaves.


I need to take a moment here to say a few words about celery leaves. We’ve all had them in our kitchens, pretty much, because when we buy a bunch of celery it usually comes with the leaves. And most of us throw them away! Please, dear readers, do not neglect your celery leaves. They are fresh and herbaceous and aromatic and delicious. You can put them in salads (example: thin slivers of celery stalk, shavings of Parmesan, chopped celery leaves and parsley, dress with lemon juice and olive oil), or you can chop them up and throw them in with your soffritto or mirepoix or whatever cooking base you use. I always put celery leaves in my stocks. You can use it like any other herb in dressings, sauces, or even soft cheeses and compound butters. For example, there is a poem attributed to Vergil that describes a peasant’s lunch of cheese seasoned with garlic, oil, vinegar, salt, coriander, rue and comas apii graciles—celery’s delicate tresses. Delectable.

Anyway, back to our pasta e fagioli. Optional additions to the soffritto: a little tomato paste, a little lardo or guanciale, or, if you’re daring, a pinch of hot red pepper flakes. Add broth or water, bring to a boil. Add the beans (rinsed and drained, if using canned; if using dried beans, add their cooking liquid too). Once the beans are heated through, this is the step where you mash the beans, if you want a thick soup. At home I use an immersion blender and give it a few quick pulses, not enough to purée the whole thing, just to break up about half the beans. La nonna would use an old-fashioned food mill. If you don’t have either of these implements, a potato masher works just fine. Naturally, the immersion blender goes straight in the pot, but if you want to use a mill or masher, take out about half the beans with a slotted spoon, mash them and then add them back in.

If you have enough broth, and depending on how soupy you want the dish you be, you can cook the pasta directly in the pot. I personally prefer to do it this way, as I’m a fan of one-pot meals, especially on busy weeknights. You can also cook the pasta separately, in salted water, and add it already cooked to the pot of beans. (This is also a terrific way to use up leftovers, if you have some plain cooked noodles lying around.) Once everything is cooked through and quite hot, check the seasoning, ladle into bowls, and dress with a drizzle of olive oil, black pepper and Parmesan.


This is the first time I’ve made pasta e fagioli with fresh beans, and they took almost an hour to cook—but still, much faster than dried, and with a creamier texture and subtler flavor. I made a big pot so I’ll be eating it all week, but I don’t expect to get tired of it anytime soon!

Oh, and let's not forget dessert:

L'arte di mangiar bene

One of the hardest things about traveling is settling into an eating routine. When I’m jet-lagged I never feel that I want meals at the appropriate mealtimes. The first night in, I had a sandwich at 8:30PM (dinner in Italy, brunch in California), but woke up hungry at 3AM because now it was dinnertime back home. There was, of course, no food in the kitchen when I arrived. By the time I had met with the landlady to get the keys etc, and called home to let everyone know I’d arrived safely, it was after 8PM and the cafés were already starting to close (it was a Sunday). At the only one still open I ordered a panino of roast eggplant, Brie, and speck. It totally hit the spot after a long and tiring trip.

Breakfast was espresso—thank goodness, there was coffee and sugar in the kitchen!—and one of the granola bars I’d brought along as an alternative to airplane food. Which, believe me, was necessary. You’d think you’d be safe ordering the vegetarian meal, right? It should be next to impossible to screw up pasta with tomato sauce, right? So, so wrong. I got a tray of lukewarm penne with a texture reminiscent of dried glue, floating in a watery, sugary pink liquid that bore as little resemblance to real tomatoes as Astroturf to an Alpine meadow. Horrifying. I hadn’t had airplane food in so long I’d forgotten how bad it could be. On the other hand, Air Dolomiti served a rather delightful snack on the short hop to Verona, a mound of sweetened whipped cream topped with raspberry sauce. You read that right: a bowl of whipped cream for each passenger. I only ate a few bites; it was really too rich, but I liked the idea of it.


After school I wandered into the Piazza delle Erbe, squeezing my way past the crowd of tourists gathered around “Juliet’s Balcony.” There were vendors selling every kind of trinket from kids’ T-shirts and souvenir pencils to Pinocchio figurines and elaborately decorated Venetian carnival masks. And, as the name suggests, there’s also a small fruit and vegetable market. Here’s what I picked up:


I have a deep fondness for zucchini blossoms. I haven’t cooked any yet this summer so I was delighted to find them. And the prices were reasonable—all of this was around 3 euro. And for 22 cents I bought a gorgeous nectarine that I snacked on as I walked home. Then it occurred to me that I don’t actually know how to say “nectarine” in Italian.

After coffee break, the rest of today’s language class was spent talking about food. The teacher went around the room and asked each of us to describe a formal meal, e.g. Christmas dinner, in our homeland. Of course, my family doesn’t really do traditional American food for Christmas, so instead I talked about Lebanese food. I described a meal that started with many antipasti (i.e. meze), and tried to list the ones that were easiest on my vocabulary: “leaves of the vine with rice and meat inside, and fava beans with garlic and parsley, and little pizzas of cheese and spinach.” Then, for the main course, “chicken with rice, or little pieces of meat roasted” (how on earth do you say “shish kebab” in Italian?). “Is there a traditional dessert?” asked the teacher. “Yes, we make a pudding of flour of rice with cinnamon and there are nuts on top.” I was almost embarrassed at these garbled descriptions—how is it that I can read Dante, but I can’t describe a simple pudding?—but on the other hand, it was the longest utterance I’d been called upon to produce in Italian in about five or six years. And frankly, everyone in the room was still learning the language; I was hardly the worst off.

I am the only American in a class of seven Europeans and one South American. The rest of the conversation was fairly mouth-watering. The German students described a traditional Christmas feast of roast goose or duck or turkey (“Goose?” asked the Brazilian incredulously; “Sì… quack, quack!” responded the German by way of clarification), served with red cabbage and dumplings; the Brazilian enthused about the fresh tropical fruit juices that were always served at the end of a meal; the Dutch described a childhood breakfast treat of chocolate or sugar sprinkles on buttered toast; the Frenchman waxed rhapsodic about cheeses, which, naturally, got all of us talking excitedly about cheeses.

And then we talked about pasta.

We talked about pasta for a good thirty minutes—about dried pasta and fresh pasta, pasta made with eggs or without eggs, noodles and macaroni and stuffed pastas and hollow pastas. We learned that bavette are the same as linguine and that agnolotti is just the Piedmontese name for tortellini. We talked about the teeny pastina that goes in soups, and the difference between minestrone (mixed vegetable soup) and minestra (clear broth with pastina, children’s food). Back in Santa Cruz, I learned a grown-up version of minestra from my fabulous Sicilian landlady. It goes something like this:

Heat a lot of olive oil in a large pot. Like enough to cover the bottom of the pot, and then some. Put in a lot of chopped garlic. No, a lot of chopped garlic! You shouldn’t be able to see the bottom of the pan, that’s how much chopped garlic you need to put in. [Tip: Buy garlic in bulk, and chop it all at once and keep in your fridge packed in jars of olive oil. Then you never have to spend time chopping garlic at the last minute, because when you’re starving that’s the last thing you feel like doing.] When the garlic smells good and is turning golden, add your vegetables. Usually broccoli, but any green vegetable is good—kale, broccoli rabe, fava beans. Whatever you like, whatever’s fresh. In a separate pot heat up chicken broth, it should be boiling, and cook broken-up spaghetti noodles in it. When the noodles are cooked, carefully pour the broth and noodles into the garlic and vegetable pot. Make sure it’s really hot, stir in a couple handfuls of Locatelli cheese, and serve hot with more cheese on top. And pepper.

Our instructor also made sure we knew that there were certain pasta dishes that people make at home, but that you can’t order in a restaurant. She described pasta al burro as one of the ultimate comfort foods. You cook your macaroni, and then you toss it with equal amounts of butter and olive oil, a generous handful of grated Parmesan cheese, and black pepper. Rigatoni is best for this one because it is one of the largest types of macaroni, and the cheese gets inside the pasta tubes and it is extra delicious that way.

After all that pasta talk, I absolutely had to have pasta for dinner tonight. I kept an eye out for grocery stores on my walk home from school but didn’t see any. The school guide lists a couple of supermarkets near our campus but I didn’t get a chance to look up directions to any—that’ll be later this week, I guess. Instead, after the fruit and vegetable market, I wandered into the salumeria-formaggeria across the street from my apartment, thinking that they surely must have something I could throw together for dinner. I grabbed a bottle of nice olive oil and some excellent prosciutto cotto for sandwiches. As for pasta, well, they only had one line of fancy artisanal pastas for €3,50 per package. I recognized the brand, which is sold in fancy grocery stores at home. In what universe does a pound of dried pasta cost more than that lovely assortment of market vegetables? I decided to splurge anyway, because a) I’ve eaten it and I know it’s good, b) €3,50 is still better than $6.99, and c) I was not about to go wandering the streets in search of a better deal. I was thinking about bucatini all’ amatriciana since it had come up in class, but I balked at the price of the fancy jarred tomato sauce, which anyway seemed like a silly purchase at the height of tomato season. So I went home sans tomato sauce, but with bucatini (basically, spaghetti with a hole in the middle) and guanciale (a key ingredient in the amatriciana—kind of like bacon, only a million times better, and made from the jowls of the pig); a small wedge of Parmesan; and a sampling of gioncata (fresh cheese) because the woman in front of me bought some and it looked delicious. And two little bread rolls. And then I realized I couldn’t make an amatriciana anyway because I didn’t have access to a recipe, and it’s not a dish I know well enough to recreate without guidance.

So instead I threw together a green salad and a pasta dish that I’m calling bucatini imprevisti:

While the water for the pasta is boiling, crisp up a few slices of guanciale. (The guy at the salumeria sliced it paper-thin, and it practically melted on contact with the hot pan. Beautiful.) When crisp, set aside on a small plate to keep warm; cut the zucchini blossoms off the zucchini and place them whole in the pan. Cook a few minutes on each side until crisp. Set blossoms aside with the guanciale, add a little olive oil to the pan, and toss in the zucchini, sliced into thin rounds. By now your water should have boiled; make sure it is well salted and add the pasta. When the zucchini is browned, add about half a cup of the pasta water and reduce until thick. When the bucatini are cooked al dente, drain them, and return to the pot; drizzle in a little more olive oil so they don’t stick. Then add the zucchini and liquid, a generous sprinkling of grated Parmesan, and some ground black pepper. Toss well. Crumble in the crisped guanciale and toss again. Transfer to a warm plate; top with the zucchini blossoms and a little more Parmesan. Buon appetito!