I did know how to cook, in an ordinary and capable way. However, since I’d left everything behind in order to travel, I adopted a similar approach to cooking, allowing myself to learn things all over again, especially the most blindingly obvious things. Such as how to fry onion, carrot, and celery to make a soffritto (the essential blend of aromatics cooked in fat, which comes from the verb soffriggere, to cook lightly in fat without frying); how to make the simplest tomato sauce; how to cook chickpeas; how to boil pasta; all things that I ostensibly knew how to do, but then again didn’t. Things that, once re-learned and better understood, have changed the way I cook. Then, with these newly acquired skills, the first dishes I made were primi, which in Rome are almost always pasta, either as part of minestra (soup) or pasta asciutta (with sauce). This section is about these dishes that, nine years later, have become central to the way I eat.
Five soups
Or, more correctly, five minestre, which is a term used for dishes of pasta or rice cooked in broth or water with vegetables and beans—and therefore eaten with a spoon—rather than soups. Let’s call them five substantial soups with pasta, which also work well without pasta if you prefer. You will find different versions and variations of minestra all over Italy, but mine are distinctly Roman ones, made my own because these are dishes that insist you do so.
While writing this book I asked friends, colleagues, cooks, and whoever else would listen how they made certain dishes, and I noticed something. While dishes like carbonara (pasta with eggs and bacon), amatriciana (pasta with tomatoes and cured pork), and coda alla vaccinara (oxtail stew) provoked strong, bold opinions that could turn into vigorous debates, minestre aroused something different. Reactions were soft, and opinions, although every bit as defined as other dishes, were what I can only describe as warm and generous. Vincenzo, as is so often the case, was the person to suggest the reason for this: minestre are the embodiment of childhood nourishment and comfort for many Italians, ladled from the pan or tureen. Pasta e patate, pasta e fagioli, pasta e ceci are dishes that stir up something elemental. More than any other, these were the dishes that people chose as their piatto preferito (favorite dish). If I’m making this seem overly sentimental I should make clear that it isn’t—minestre are too functional and no-nonsense for that.
Despite my initial suspicion and reluctance about what felt like unlikely pairings (pasta and beans, pasta and potatoes, pasta and chickpeas) and my long-held idea that soup, however good, wasn’t really a meal, they have become the cornerstones of my diet. Tasty, nourishing, economical to make, generous, infinitely accommodating, minestre are dishes that we eat a couple of times a week. All five are based on more or less the same principle, which is that beans or legumes are cooked until tender, then added to a soffritto of aromatics cooked in fat along with enough water, or their cooking water, to cook the pasta. Beyond these basic principles, minestre can be simple or more complex, brothy and distinct, or blended until they are creamy. They can be rich red with tomato, or just blushing, or have no tomato at all; they can include herbs or cured pork. In short, having understood the basic principles, you make the recipe your own.
Odori
You don’t need to return to the same Roman market stall more than a couple of times to be asked if you need odori, literally “aromas,” in other words the aromatic herbs and vegetables that will accompany whatever else you have bought and plan to cook. My kind and funny fruttivendolo, Gianluca—who is learning English and uses my visits as impromptu lessons—calls them “smells,” which makes us laugh every time. Depending on the season, your plans, and the mood of your fruttivendolo, the odori could be a carrot, a rib of celery, and a small onion for broth, a bunch of parsley for sauce, a stalk of floppy-leaved basil for tomatoes or to dab behind your ears, a tuft of rosemary for potatoes, a sprig of sage for melted butter, or a pair of bay leaves for the beans. Odori are stuffed matter-of-factly into the top of your shopping bag at no further cost except loyalty.
It is odori, notably onion, celery, and the fat stems and flat leaves of parsley, that make up the soffritto, the foundation of the following soup recipes. Rather like knowing how to boil pasta, make tomato sauce, cook beans, or gently cook garlic in olive oil, making a soffritto was something I needed to re-learn. I wasn’t that far off the mark, but that was more down to good luck than good planning, since I’d never really afforded much attention to that important task. A good soffritto starts at the market or shops, and finding vegetables that taste as bright and vigorous as they should; tasteless, dull vegetables will make a tasteless, dull soffritto. Having washed or peeled the vegetables, they need chopping evenly and finely with a sharp knife, along with a little cured pork if the recipe calls for it. In Rome, the mixture of aromatics was traditionally parsley and onion with lard and was called a battuto, which takes its name from the verb battere, “to strike,” and refers to the striking action of the knife.
Once you have a pile of finely chopped aromatics—which always reminds me of vegetable confetti—you put them in a suitable pan with plenty of extra-virgin olive oil over low heat and cook them gently. Now, the relaxed, familiar way in which Italian cooks execute a soffritto can be misleading, since it suggests that it doesn’t really need much attention or thought, which it does, especially when you’re learning how it should look and smell. The vegetables should sizzle gently and comfortably in adequate olive oil; they need the odd nudge and budge around the pan (a wooden spatula is best), making sure they aren’t too close to a hot edge or neglected up on the side of the pan. The soffritto is ready when the vegetables are soft, translucent, and fragrant and your kitchen smells good. This usually takes about 8 minutes. You will know.
Pasta e patate
Pasta and potato soup
This seems a good recipe to begin with because it’s a good example of both a soffritto and a quintessential minestra. The disconcerting, even improbable, name suggests something rather too dense, or beige, or starchy. At least, I thought so when I stood beside my friend Ezio as he began chopping vegetables. The bowlful he served me 30 minutes later turned out to confirm none of my fears, but was instead a tasty and satisfying minestra that I now make once a week—not because I find myself with nothing more than an onion, a potato, a stick of celery, and a carrot with alarming regularity, nor because it’s so straightforward (although both are true), but because I like it so much.
Pasta e patate is pure-tasting, elemental even, but elemental along with substance from starchy, collapsing potatoes and tender pasta. Adults and children alike adore its sweet, satisfying simplicity. With plenty of freshly ground pepper and some bold pecorino romano, this innocent soup grows up and answers back. I’ll finish by noting that the best version I’ve ever made was in England, in my parents’ old kitchen, with a pair of handsome English spuds and two strips of English bacon. My two food worlds collided in a bowl of soup, eaten while watching Newsnight.
serves 4
1 onion
1 large carrot
1 celery stalk
about 2 ounces guanciale or pancetta (optional)
5 tablespoons olive oil
2 large potatoes, about 1¼ pounds
salt
7 ounces small pasta or broken spaghetti
freshly ground black pepper
grated Parmesan or pecorino, to serve
Finely dice the onion, carrot, and celery. If you are using it, finely chop the guanciale or pancetta along with the vegetables. Heat the olive oil in a deep frying pan or heavy-based soup pan, add the vegetables and guanciale, and cook gently until soft and fragrant. This should take about 8 minutes.
Meanwhile, dice the potatoes into 1-inch cubes and add them to the pan, stirring so that each piece glistens with oil. Add 6½ cups of water to cover the vegetables by at least 2 inches. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to a simmer. Cook gently for 15 minutes, or until the vegetables are soft. Taste and season with salt.
Add the pasta and increase the heat so that the soup boils for 8 minutes, adding more hot water if necessary—it should be dense but soupy—and stirring so the pasta doesn’t stick. Taste and add more salt if necessary, and a few grinds of black pepper. Serve directly from the pan, passing around a bowl of grated Parmesan or pecorino for people to stir into their soup. Or, more correctly—at least, more traditionally—you should pour the soup into a tureen or soup bowl, stir in 6 tablespoons grated cheese, then serve at the table.
Pasta e lenticchie
Pasta and lentil soup
This is one of the most deeply satisfying bowls of food I know. It’s good value, too, and good luck if you eat it on New Year’s Eve, when the more money-shaped lentils you consume, the more fortune you will have the following year. Also, for someone like me, who lacks bean foresight and nearly always forgets to soak in advance, lentils, which don’t require a long bath, are a great kitchen standby.
The recipe starts with patience, just a little, enough to fan the lentils out on a tray and scan them with your eyes, as there’s almost always a tiny stone hiding, especially if you are using good lentils. It’s a task that probably takes a minute at most but it’s the kind of instruction that can make me disproportionately irritated, as in “I really don’t have time to be fussing with that.” This is a reaction I’ve learned to interpret as a sort of kitchen alarm, because more often than not this is precisely when I need a moment of patient slow-motion, and to remember that it’s often the details that make the difference between food that’s just cooked and food that’s cooked well. Even on the most fraught days, having taken the cooking equivalent of a deep breath, I proceed differently. I also don’t have stones in my minestra.
The base is a soffritto of onion, celery, and if possible a couple of fat parsley stalks. If you eat meat, you could also add some chopped pancetta or guanciale (cured pork cheek). The best lentils for this dish are from Castelluccio in Umbria because they have a unique fragrant, nutty taste and almost floury texture when cooked, which means they absorb the flavors of other ingredients well. This is why they are cooked alone first with bay leaves before being united with the other ingredients, resulting in two layers of flavor.
The key to this dish is the consistency, the critical point somewhere between a soup and a stew: soft enough to ripple when scooped up with a spoon, but thick enough to have real body. To get to this point the pasta and lentils should be relatively brothy in the pan, so that by the time you get to the table they’re still swelling, and the dish will have thickened up nicely. Rest assured that however good you are at finding this elusive point, by the time it comes to seconds, the pasta and lentils remaining in the pan will have seized into a stew that your spoon will stand to attention in. In this case, just add a splash of boiling water and another grind of salt to loosen it all up again. Also rest assured that catching the point of perfect minestre consistency is an art many Italians spend a lifetime trying to master. Perfect consistency or not, pasta and lentils finished with a little extra-virgin olive oil and a tumbler of fat Umbrian white wine like Orvieto is a simple, satisfying lunch.
serves 4
1 cup small brown lentils, such as Castelluccio or Orsano
2 bay leaves
salt
1 small onion
1 garlic clove
1 celery stalk with a few feathery leaves
2 stalks flat-leaf parsley
¾ to 1 cup canned plum tomatoes or passata
5 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve
1 small chile, chopped
7 ounces dried pasta, such as ditalini, or 9 ounces fresh egg quadrucci (see here)
freshly ground black pepper
Spread the lentils out on a tray and check for any tiny stones with your hands and eyes. In a large pan, cover the lentils with 6½ cups of water and add the bay leaves and a teaspoon of salt. Bring to a boil and then cook, covered, over low heat until the lentils are tender but not mushy. This can take 20–40 minutes, depending on the type and age of the lentils. I start tasting them after 15 minutes.
Finely dice the onion and garlic and finely chop the celery and parsley. If you are using canned tomatoes, pass them through a food mill or puree them with an immersion blender. Heat the oil in a large heavy-based soup pot, add the vegetables, and cook gently over low heat until they are soft and fragrant. This should take about 10 minutes. Add the tomato, chile, and a pinch of salt, stir, and cook over low heat for 10 minutes, until the sauce has reduced and the oil is starting to float free. Add the lentils and their cooking liquid, stir, and taste to check for salt.
Add the pasta and bring the soup back to a gentle boil for as long as the pasta needs to cook until tender. For small dried pasta, this will probably be about 8 minutes, for fresh pasta, about 5 minutes. Keep stirring so that the pasta doesn’t stick, and add a little more water if necessary. Check the seasoning. Serve immediately with a little best-quality extra-virgin olive oil poured over the top and pepper, for those who want it.
Cranberry beans
There’s no two ways about it: fresh cranberry beans are beautiful, their pink-streaked ivory pods opening up to reveal similarly colored beans. When they’re in season and turning heads at the market, I buy kilo after kilo, then upturn the bag to tumble the pods onto the kitchen table for the communal podding, which is fitting, since another name by which they are known, borlotti, comes from the verb borlare, which means “tumble” and evokes the way the oldest plants grow.
When fresh cranberry beans are not available I buy dried beans, which, although subdued in color to beige and burnt red, still have a mottled beauty. The dried beans are skittled into bowls, as they need soaking in cold water overnight. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop being disappointed by the way the beans, both fresh and dried, lose their distinctive speckles and turn plainly brown as they cook. Their cooked flavor doesn’t disappoint, though, and the texture is almost meaty and smoothly creamy. This flavor and texture is the reason cranberry beans make such brilliant minestre, especially the ones you add pasta to. Cranberry beans, particularly fresh ones, are also delicious boiled and dressed while still warm with good extra-virgin olive oil and salt, which we often have for lunch with a salad and some cheese, or piled on toast rubbed with garlic. Warm cranberry beans with olive oil and salt, and possibly a handful of peppery arugula withering obediently in the residual heat, are also great with grilled fish and meat, particularly lamb.
Pasta e fagioli
Pasta and bean soup
The cooking water surrounding just-cooked beans or chickpeas is a cloudy, murky affair that looks, particularly in the case of cranberry beans, decidedly unappealing, like the water somebody with a purple rinse has washed their hair in. For years, if I ever got my act together and soaked and cooked dried beans, I watched the cloudy bean broth spin and disappear down the drain like other murky liquids. I was a kitchen fool. Bean-cooking water is good stuff, cloudy with the almost sweet, nutty goodness that has seeped out of the beans as they cooked, and it will provide your soup or stew with body and depth. It is in some ways a secret ingredient—that fifth quarter, if you like.
Pasta e fagioli is one of my favorite recipes in the book. Not just because it’s one of my favorite things to eat, but also because it embodies so much of what I like about Roman food. It’s simple, tasty, resourceful, generous. In summer it’s made with fresh cranberry beans and for the rest of the year, dried beans are used. Both fresh and dried (and canned, in a pinch) cranberry beans taste somewhere between a chickpea, a cannellini bean, and a chestnut and are, in my opinion, the best bean for pasta e fagioli.
Soaked cranberry beans are cooked in water with a couple of bay leaves until tender, producing a sweet, nutty, slightly starchy broth. The beans are then added to a soffritto of onion, celery, and olive oil, to which you add just a little tomato and the bean broth in order to make soup, in which you cook the pasta. This is a substantial dish that calls for a substantial wine, a big but soft and rounded red with lots of flavor, such as a Sagrantino di Montefalco.
serves 4
1¼ cups dried cranberry beans or 2¼ pounds fresh cranberry beans, podded
2 bay leaves
1 small onion
1 celery stalk
5 tablespoons good extra-virgin olive oil, plus extra to serve
7 ounces canned plum tomatoes
salt
7 ounces pasta (ideally dried tubetti or ditalini, or fresh maltagliati)
If you are using dried beans, soak them in plenty of cold water for at least 12 hours, or overnight. Drain the soaked beans or pod the fresh ones and put them in a large pan. Cover them with about 6½ cups water, add the bay leaves, bring to a boil, and reduce the heat to a gentle simmer. Cook for about 30 minutes, or until the beans are getting tender but are still just a little firm. The exact time will depend on the age of the beans; I start tasting after 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, finely dice the onion and finely chop the celery. Heat the olive oil in a large, heavy-based pan, add the onion and celery, and cook gently over low heat until soft and fragrant. If you have one, pass the tomatoes through a food mill before adding them to the pan. If you don’t have a food mill, add the tomatoes as they are, but crush them with the back of a wooden spoon. Stir and allow the tomatoes to bubble for about 5 minutes, before using a slotted spoon to lift the beans into the pan. Stir, then add 4½ cups of the bean-cooking liquid you have just lifted the beans from, making it up with hot water if necessary.
Let the soup bubble away gently for about 10 minutes, or until the beans are tender. Remove a cup of beans and broth from the pan, process it until smooth with an immersion blender or pass it through the food mill, and return it to the pan. Season generously with salt.