Pasta e Fagioli alla Veneta

The cooking of Venice is so distant from that of Naples, although they are both Italian cities, that not a single authentic dish from one is to be found on the other's table. This truth applies nowhere more clearly than to pasta e fagioli. The Neapolitan version is red with tomatoes. The Venetian version contains none. If you add tomatoes, you are no longer making Venetian food. You are making something else.

In the Veneto, this soup is white and creamy, thickened by the beans themselves. You cook borlotti until some of them dissolve into the broth while others hold their shape. You enrich it with pork rind or pancetta, which gives body and depth without announcing itself. The pasta is short and sturdy, something that will not fall apart as the soup rests and thickens.

This is peasant cooking. Contadini in the hills behind Venice and Verona made this with dried beans from the summer harvest, a scrap of pork saved from the slaughter, and whatever pasta was in the cupboard. They knew what we have forgotten: that the humblest ingredients, treated with respect and given time, become extraordinary.