Greetings gourmands, foodies, and simple home cooks! The Cooking Corner is back for its final installment of 2025. It's been a good year for the Corner, with plenty of highs and probably a couple of lows. We've been fortunate that the cookbooks we've looked at have been helpful, down to earth, and simple enough for even the simplest of home cooks (i.e., me). We'll be closing out the year in similar fashion with Milk Street Backroads Italy: Finding Italy's Forgotten Recipes.
This cookbook takes us off the beaten path of typical Italian tourism, from the main areas of Rome to other lesser known regions like Campania or Calabria. Our recipe of focus for today comes from the small village of Monteveglio just outside Bologna. The soup is called Zuppa di Fagioli con Pasta (pages 52-53), and though fairly simple it does not disappoint. It's a hearty bean soup with garlic and aromatic herbs, and the recipe requires fresh pasta, as dried will not cook properly in the soup. You can make the pasta yourself, or you can buy it at most grocery stores. To keep things simple, this time I bought mine from a store that receives its pasta fresh daily, thanks to its immediate proximity to an Italian restaurant. I have made pasta from scratch a few times before with varying degrees of success. However that, as we say in these blog entries, is a story for another day.
We begin with a chopped yellow onion, some smashed and peeled garlic cloves, and tomato paste.
"For weeknight ease," as the book puts it, we will make use of canned beans. I scoured the area but was unable to find the prescribed Roman beans. Fortunately the authors let us know that pinto beans are a worthy substitute. Add fresh herbs (I used rosemary, you can also try consistently undervalued sage) water, salt and pepper, and cook until the beans are soft. The recipe also calls for an optional parmesan rind at this step to cook along with your beans for added depth of flavor. I wasn't planning on using one, but much to my surprise (surprises abound when you're as forgetful as I am) I had a rind on hand from a previous recipe.
Once this stage is complete you'll want to remove and discard the rind. A typical counter top blender comes into play at this stage, but you have to let it cool for 10 minutes first. Who has time for that? Not us! So I get to skip cooling and show off another treasured kitchen gadget, the Immersion Blender.
Once it's all beautifully blended together, it's time to add 8 oz of a thicker fresh pasta. I used fettuccine. Cook until al dente, season with salt and pepper, and serve with grated parmesan on top.
I think I let mine cook a little long and the pasta absorbed some of the liquid, but it was fantastic and didn't take too long!
So there's our soup! I hope you'll give it a go and if you do, I hope you enjoy it. Some final thoughts for 2025 from the Corner: Learn by doing, find joy in the great food you'll produce, and don't be afraid to botch a recipe now and then! As Julia Child would say, no one is born a great cook!