When I was just a toddler, I destroyed one of my parents’ cookbooks, Ada Boni’s Il Talismano della Felicità, so that it was barely held together by it’s binding. It’s cover, which is permanently etched in my memory, was of a rugged-looking man hungrily eating a bowl of beans. Somehow there is something very manly about a dish of beans. My father loves beans, I love beans, and so did my maternal grandfather, Nonno Fin, whose recipe this is. I wonder if it was that “bean gene” that made me attack that book.