6/30/2023 0 Comments Pasta e fagioliTomatoes are very much optional – they play no part at all in Contaldo’s recipe – but, simmered down until they become one with the beans, they do add a pleasant dose of umami. ‘Peasant food of the most warming and comforting kind’: Russell Norman’s pasta e fagioli. So often relegated to a supporting role, beans should be the star ingredient in this dish. The sharpness of garlic doesn’t feel quite right here for some reason, but the other vegetables are a great pairing with the earthiness of the beans, giving them a fuller, more rounded flavour.īoth Hazan and Contaldo mash some of the cooked beans into the broth to thicken it, which seems an eminently sensible idea, making the whole dish even more emphatically beany – on which note, though Galletto’s butter beans work just fine, we find they lack the flavour of the borlotti – even Hazan’s suggested kidney beans would probably be a more interesting option. Norman cooks his beans with onion, garlic and rosemary, while nonna Anna and Galletto pop in carrot and celery. If you do use tinned, loosen the water in the tin with chicken or vegetable stock. Tinned work just fine, especially if you’re in a hurry (Contaldo’s recipe can be on the table in half an hour), but dried are a better alternative, simply because you can flavour them as you like during cooking, and use the cooking water to make a really beany broth, of which more later. However, as the season draws to a close, they’re not the most practical recommendation. Happily, I find fresh, candy-spotted borlotti without too much trouble, and can confirm that they are truly worth tracking down ( or planting for next year): plump and nutty, they’re a quite superior product to the dried kind. Contaldo recommends tinned in his Pasta Perfecto!, though, “time permitting”, you could use dried “if you prefer” Galletto’s recipe, “alla montanara”, deploys dried “large white beans, called fagioli di Spagna in Italian”, and, I assume, butter beans in English. Outside their summer season, dried, as used by Anna, one of the nonnas in the new Pasta Grannies book, and Norman in his book Polpo, are a “wholly satisfactory substitute”. When cooked, she says, “its flavour is unlike that of any other bean, subtly recalling chestnuts”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this universally popular dish can be made with a number of different beans – Marcella Hazan calls borlotti, “brightly marbled in white and pink”, the “classic” variety in her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, recommending the fresh sort when in season. Lucio Galletto’s version: one of the few dishes that unify Italy’.
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