Lentil Soup with Pasta and Mint

I FIRST tasted this soup in Astypalaia, the tiny, picturesque Dodecanese island. The lentils were mixed with small, somewhat crude pieces of homemade pasta and seasoned with plenty of fresh mint. In T. F. Horowitz’s book Generations of Mediterranean Sephardic Cooking, with recipes from the island of Rhodes—which is also in the Dodecanese—I found a similar soup: lentils with vermicelli cooked in tomato sauce. In my version of the dish, I prefer to use tiny pa