Fagioli: The Bean Cuisine of Italy

by Judi Barrett

From thick, rich minestrone with beans and vegetables, to delectable chickpea fritters, here are 124 easy-to-prepare, delicious, authentic favorites-in the only cookbook devoted solely to the glories of Italian bean cookery Satisfying, nutritious, wonderfully adaptable, and one of the least expensive forms of protein, beans are an integral part of the cuisines of cultures all over the globe. This is especially true in Italy today, where you can find hundreds of bean recipes from nearly every region and where, for most families, eating beans is as fundamental as eating pasta. In Fagioli, the co-author of the best-selling cookbook Risotto celebrates the bean cuisine of Italy in all its splendid variety and versatility. Here you will
- Bean Basics-everything you need to know to cook and enjoy beans, including a guide to the most common beans in Italy and their American counterparts - Ingredient Guide-information on the special Italian or hard-to-find ingredients, what they are, and how you can purchase them through mail-order and online resources -·124 authentic dishes-both traditional and new-providing flavorful and creative ways to prepare in antipasti and salads; in soups; with grains including polenta, barley, and faro; with pasta; and in hearty entrees prepared with meats, including sausages, game, beef, lamb, and pork.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Cooking, Nonfiction, Italy

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Judi Barrett is the author of many well-loved books for children, including Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, Pickles to Pittsburgh, Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, and Things That Are Most in the World. She teaches art to kindergarten students at a school in her Brooklyn, New York, neighborhood. And she usually doesn't mind going to the dentist!

Reviews

[Shauna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciated the book for the good details on preparing beans. The recipes are odd - often quite bland and using minimal seasonings. The portions also end up small for the # of servings. I would recommend the book for getting general inspiration for ingredients you can combine but be prepared to improvise significantly depending on taste preferences.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bought the Rancho Gordo release of this book, which isn't yet added here. I've really enjoyed all of the recipes I've had a chance to make so far. They do seem simple, as good Italian recipes can be, but I see that there's a lot of potential for me in this book, since I cook and eat a lot of beans.

[Lagobond]

So far I've only tried the Soup of Lentils and Mushrooms. It looked like what you rake up in the yard at the end of fall, and tasted... uniformly brown. That's honestly the best description I can give. I love both lentils and porcini mushrooms, but in this recipe neither was doing the other any favors. The sautéed oyster mushroom topping didn't enhance things either.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm on a mission to add more meatless meals to my culinary efforts. Not because I'm looking to go vegetarian or vegan, but because there are times where my stomach just does not want to digest meat properly. I notice when I eat a meal centered around beans rather than animal products, I have fewer digestive issues. My finicky stomach is the result of a surgery 15 years ago so I cater to my cranky gut more and more. Veggies & beans = happy Frankenstomach.

I've checked several vegetarian, vegan and bean cook books out from my local library to find some "starter" recipes to help me expand my use of beans in my diet. I already make my own hummus. I'd like to expand my choices past the usual lentils, pintos, black beans, kidney beans and chickpeas though. I love butter beans, limas and white beans. And I'd like to try some other options that I don't normally buy.

The recipes in this book were really not what I'm looking for. Most of the basic recipes are things that I already cook. And for the rest -- I don't eat pasta or polenta, and I'm not going to eat octopus or squid, and I don't really want to add so much olive oil to my food. Don't get me wrong -- I love Italian food. But I am the odd person at the table who eats the sauce over vegetables or subs in quinoa or falafel rather than noodles. The basics of this book are meals I already cook -- beans in tomato sauce with spices, etc. Italian pasta sauces with beans, which I will put over sweet potato, cabbage of brussel sprouts rather than pasta.

This is a great basic Italian cookbook that uses beans, and has wonderful explanations of what beans go in what dish and how to cook them. Great book -- just not the one I was looking for.

I am very appreciative of my local library system. They ordered this book on interlibrary loan for me. Very, very thankful for their services as I can access almost any book I want with their help! :)

[Geary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book. The only reference area that I was lacking in Italian cooking. Very simple recipes with wide expansion/substitution changes possible in each. Recommended.

[Kate Landis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I know this makes me a lightweight, but I like a cookbook with pictures.

[Jennifer Schnakenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to say I actually read this (some cookbooks are readable and others merely skim-able ), but there was a numbing sameness to the recipes.

[Betsy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good book on beans and cooking them. The recipes were not particularly interesting.

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s hard to go wrong with a cookbook focused on dried beans. I have one from Michigan already, focusing on beans grown in Michigan. A book on beans used in Italy ought to be a great complement for any fan of dried bean dishes, and this one is.

The first dish I made was the Spuma di Ceci, or “whipped chickpea-and-potato spread”. It is basically a hummus, flavored with a little potato and red onion along with the olive oil. It’s meant for serving with toasted bread, but I just ate it as a side dish topped with more red onion (the latter is part of the recipe).

It’s a simple recipe, and a great dish. It also goes very well with fried garlic.

Even more simple is the Fagioli e Olio Nonna Pistelli—Grandma Pistelli’s Beans in Olive Oil. Grandma Pistelli is not her grandmother, but the mother of “Enzo Pistelli, a bean grower and olive maker in Southern Umbria”. It calls for two cups of cooked “purgatorio or navy beans”, but there’s nothing in it that can’t be prorated. So I made it with the leftover chickpeas from the previous recipe.

It’s one of those recipes where the recipe is literally in the title. It’s beans in olive oil (a lot of olive oil), seasoned with salt and pepper. It would do well with fresh red onions and/or roasted garlic added, but I ate it too quickly to do any experimenting.

The least of the recipes was still pretty good, with one caveat. For New Year’s I made the Zuppa di Fagioli, Pasta e Pomodoro, or Soup of Borlotti Beans, Fettuccini, and Tomato. Despite the title, the recipe calls for “2 cups cooked borlotti, pinto, or cranberry beans”. I used pinto.

Halfway through making it, I discovered a potentially major typo in this recipe. It says to “simmer until… the lentils and peas are cooked through—about 45 minutes”. There are no lentils or peas in the list of ingredients. There are lentils and peas in the ingredient list of the recipe on the facing page, however. The facing page recipe calls for, besides the two cups of beans and four ounces of pasta that the recipes share, one cup of brown lentils.

There is no errata on on Judith Barrett’s web site, and her contact form is down, but I suspect that the ten cups of cold water that the Zuppa di Fagioli calls for is part of the typo—this recipe doesn’t need that much water because it doesn’t have the lentils. If I make it again, I’ll drop the water down to eight cups. It seemed a bit watered down. It was still good, but should have been better.

I had enough pinto beans leftover to make the previous two recipes again, with pinto beans. Hummus made with pinto beans is basically a very light refried beans; I knew this going in, so added a bit of jalapeño along with the red onion.

Pinto beans are also a little closer to the purgatorios called for in the Fagioli e Olio; this was a great breakfast on the morning of New Year’s Day. Both of those recipes are great ways of using up leftover beans from other recipes.

The introduction on cooking beans is also useful, although rambling enough that you have to read carefully to glean actual methods. Much of the rambling is about the long, slow process of making beans and bean dishes. The summarized instructions appear to be mostly the time-saving modern process, which is fine, but it seems to me that if the best way to cook them is “slowly and gently—so gently, in fact, that you can barely detect the beans are cooking when looking into the pot” some advice on the slow method would be useful. It isn’t as if crockpots aren’t a common appliance in modern kitchens.

The first time I softened beans (chickpeas) I used the stovetop method; it worked fine. The second time (pinto beans) I put them in a crockpot overnight on low. This worked even better. When I measured the beans in the morning, I had a little over three cups. Since I only needed two, I had a breakfast of Fagioli e Olio with pinto beans as the bean.

This required planning ahead: the morning before the day I needed the beans, I started them soaking; that night, I put them in the crockpot; they were ready for making Zuppa di Fagioli the next day.

In each case I used her method of adding one unpeeled clove of garlic and a bay leaf to the pot.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

More of a recipe book, but what I found helpful to my chickpea research was the introduction and history of beans. Good source of information about the where you can find the best beans (Tuscany), the kinds, and their history.