Bean and Pasta Soup

Although this recipe may take closer to 45 minutes to prepare than 30, Pasta e Fagioli is one of northern Italy’s best known and loved soups and deserves to be included in this book. There are many variations of this soup and one of my favorites is from the Veneto, where the soup is thick and creamy, a texture that is achieved by mixing in some mashed boiled potato as well as mashing some of the beans. The beans traditionally used in this soup are cranberry beans, borlotti in Italian