Lagane e Fagioli

Lagane are among the oldest pasta shapes in Italy, wide flat ribbons whose name traces back through Latin and Greek. The poet Horace, writing in the 1st century BC, described going home to a bowl of leeks, chickpeas and laganum, and Apicius recorded it too; that ancient laganum was a thin sheet, often fried rather than boiled, but it is the direct ancestor of today's hand-rolled lagane. Paired with legumes, the pasta became a pillar of southern cucina povera. The oldest partner is the chickpea, as in Horace's bowl and in the Cilento's lagane e ceci; beans came later, after cannellini and their kin crossed from the Americas, giving the lagane e fagioli of Irpinia, where laene e fasuli is made with egg pasta and white beans. Cooked together in one pot, the beans' starchy broth becomes the sauce.

Soft, creamy beans and broad, slightly chewy ribbons of pasta in a thick, garlicky broth thickened by their own starch. Homely and warming, savoury with olive oil and a hint of tomato, the kind of one-pot food eaten with a spoon and a piece of bread.

This is a dish that thickens itself. The eggless lagane are simply flour and water, rolled thin and cut wide, with a rough, porous surface that drinks up broth. Dried beans are soaked first to hydrate them and shorten cooking, then simmered slowly until their starch granules gelatinise and the flesh turns creamy, while pectin from the skins and starch leaching into the water thicken the liquid into a broth that needs no other thickener. When the lagane cook in that same broth, they shed still more starch, binding pasta, beans and liquid into one silky pot. There is old nutritional sense in it too: the wheat supplies the amino acid the beans lack and the beans supply the one wheat lacks, so together they make a complete protein, which is why this poor-man's pairing sustained the south for centuries.