Pasta e fagioli: comfort food a' la Italian

The English expression comfort food is I one I adore. It manages to convey immediately images of satisfying, sinful dishes, rich, full of flavors. You see a bowl of mac & cheese and you immediately know that it will comfort your soul, and bring you back to your childhood home. Same thing for a good chicken pot pie, or a hearty stew.

Although the terminology doesn't exist in the Italian language, the same dishes do exist. As it is the case for  their American counterparts, they are mostly Fall or Winter foods. Dishes that are able to warm up both your body and your soul after a cold day out.

In my private recipe book, one of the opening recipes of an imaginary comfort food section would be pasta e fagioli (pasta and beans). "Pasta e fagioli" is one of those dishes that everybody cooks in Italy, everywhere. Yet I dare you finding two versions that are exactly the same. Not only does the dish varies from region to region or from city to city, but even from family to family within the same block. The reason why every region has its version is because this is one of those dishes of the so called cucina povera (poor cuisine): it is a dish made of only a few ingredients that most people would still have at home at the end of the month, when money was little, and fancy food was scarce.

To qualify as pasta e fagioli, the dish needs to have some type of pasta and some type of beans, and be more liquid than a normal pasta dish. I am not saying it needs to be a soup (although it can be a soup), but it definitively needs to have some more liquid than it would be acceptable in a normal pasta dish. Other than that, there are no limits to the variations of what you will find: cannellini beans, garbanzo beans, short ditalini pasta, broken spaghetti, oregano, other spices...The main discussion is about tomato: there are family that will laugh at you if you mention that your mother used to put tomato in her version, and family that will spit to your face if you say that you eat your pasta e fagioli without tomato. In Italy we are able to divide ourselves in two camps pretty much on everything, and pasta e fagioli is no exception.

There are more versions of this dish in Italy than stars in the sky...

The version I grew up with has tomato in it (lots of it), borlotti beans and ditalini pasta, small tubes of pasta, like elbows, but without the bend. When my grandma was around, the ditalini would be replaced by quadrucci pasta, which is nothing more than home made tagliatelle cut in quadrucci, i.e. very small squares (this pasta is typical from the region my mother comes from, Marches). (See the photos of both pasta shapes at the bottom of the post).

You cannot really say that this version is a soup. It is liquid, but not too liquid: the pasta ends up soaking up all the liquid, becoming a swollen mess, which is what makes it fantastic to my eyes. This is actually one of my childhood memories I love the most: watching my mum putting the pasta e fagioli in a bowl, and then wait 1/2 hour for the pasta to cool off and absorb almost all the liquid...

A couple of nights ago, feeling homesick, I decided to make it. It had been ages since I had last made it. And while I was at it, I thought that it is one of those dishes for which improvements are out of the question. Yes, you could probably add more spices, and get more flavor. Yes,  you could add bacon and get some smokiness in it that would turn it into a crowd pleasure. And  yet, that would not be my pasta e fagioli, the one I grew up with. The one that is perfect as it is, the one that I will never change a bit.

Pasta e fagioli di Licia (6-8 persone)
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Ingredients

• 400 grams of ditalini rigati pasta (14oz)
• 2 cans of borlotti beans, rinsed
• 1.8 pounds (800 grams) of pomodori pelati, crashed in a food processor, or of tomato puree
• 7.5 cups (1.8 liters) of water 
• 1 onion, peeled and cut in half 
• 1/4 cup olive oil
• salt and pepper
• sugar, a pinch

How to make it

• In a large soup pan, heat up the oil until it starts smoking. Reduce the heat, add the two onion halves (the oil will sputter), and let it cook for 5 minutes, stirring the oil every now and then, letting the onion burn. Once the two halves are well burnt on all sides, take them out with a wooden spoon and throw them away. 
• Add the tomato puree. Add salt and sugar (to reduce the tomato acidity), and stir for a couple of minutes. 
• Add the borlotti beans, stir. Add the water (possibly, your water should be boiling hot: warm it up in a tea maker or in a separate pan, but do not use warm tap water). Stir, bring to boil, and let it simmer for at least 1 hour, stirring now and then. 
• Throw in the ditalini pasta, and cook for the time indicated on the pasta package. 
• Serve in pasta bowls, and let it rest for at least 20 minutes. This "soup" shouldn't be eaten too warm. Resting will also give the pasta time to absorb even more water. 
• Eat

PS: If you have left over, by the time you will have finished eating, you will notice that the pasta in the pan will have absorbed almost all the water. That's how it should be. Don't panic, because you are in for a treat. After a nice night in the fridge this "soup" can be warmed up and eaten without adding any liquid, and it will give you a taste of paradise. Believe me. 

Ditalini rigati

Quadrucci