Bean & Pasta Soup

This has become one of my family’s most dearly loved recipes, despite my mother’s dreadful experience at school! If you use fresh beans in their pods, they will need to be shelled, soaked and treated like dried beans, though cooked for a little less time, or you can use tinned beans. Beppino always added a special wild herb he picked for the soup, called puerin in the local dialect, but I think it was probably nepitella, known as “lesser calamint” in English.<