Pasta e Fagioli (Pasta and Beans)

Variations

• There is traditionally no meat in it. ko.wikipedia files it as a traditional dish with no meat, which started as a poor man's food like pizza or polenta. The pancetta came later.
• Which bean: borlotti or cannellini, and it varies by region — borlotti in the Veneto, cannellini in Tuscany.
• Which pasta: ditalini or small elbows. In Naples the correct thing is pasta mischiata, the odds and ends of several shapes used up together — and the fact that they cook at different rates is the character of it rather than a fault.
• How thick: the Veneto version stands a spoon up in it, the Neapolitan one is soupier. Inside one name it moves between a soup and a pasta dish.
• Against minestrone: minestrone is a vegetable soup that sometimes has pasta in it; this one is built out of beans and pasta and needs nothing else.
• The next day: the pasta will have drunk the broth and a spoon will stand up in it. In Italy that is not treated as a failure — loosen it with a little water and serve it again.

Tips

• The cooking water is the soup, and that is the whole dish. Cooking noodles calls the dissolved starch in that water "an ingredient", tells you to reserve two or three tablespoons of it, and goes as far as "pasta wants less water than most people use." This dish takes that to its end: there is no water to reserve, and 100% of the starch the pasta sheds stays in the pot. Aglio e olio and carbonara build a sauce out of the water they saved; this one never has to save any.
• Which inverts the order of the salting. The first line of that same guide is that salt in the water is your only chance to season the noodle. Here that water is the broth, so there is no 1% salted water to use, and getting the broth's seasoning exactly right before the pasta goes in takes its place. Salt added later makes the broth salty and leaves the pasta bland.
• No acid in the bean water. Soaking is explicit that vinegar, tomato and lemon set pectin firm, which is why the tomato goes in only once the beans are tender — the same order red red and chana masala use.
• A small, short shape. Heat does not move through a thick broth the way it moves through water, so a long shape goes slack outside and stays hard in the middle. Ditalini being the standard is not an accident.
• Blend only a third of the beans. Blend them all and it is bean soup; blend none and the broth is thin. It is how you get body and bite out of one pot.
• Off the heat, ten minutes, then serve. The pasta goes on taking up liquid, so the consistency inside the pot keeps moving — the point mie goreng makes from the noodle end. Judge the thickness at the moment you serve, not at the moment it is cooked.
• Do not serve it hot. Warm or at room temperature is the Italian way, and the olive oil poured over reads better at that temperature too.