Pasta with Chickpeas

In my ongoing quest to discover good new-to-me recipes among cookbooks in my current collection, I just made a three-base hit from one of my oldest volumes: The Tuscan Cookbook by Wilma Pezzini, published in 1978.

Pezzini, a Polish woman married to an Italian doctor and living in a small town in Tuscany, was neither a professional writer nor a professional cook. This, her only book, is a personal compendium of “the everyday dishes eaten in Tuscany today, with a few comments on where they come from, how they became the way they are, and anything else I thought might be of interest.”

The three recipes I’ve just made from the book span the principal parts of an Italian meal: a first-course primo, a main-course secondo, and a dessert, a dolce. I’m going to give each of them its own post, starting today with the primo, pasta with chickpeas.

To make half a recipe’s worth, I soaked four ounces of dried chickpeas overnight. The recipe calls for a 24-hour soak, with baking soda to help soften them, but I knew my chickpeas were reasonably fresh and didn’t need that much time. The next morning, I drained the chickpeas and put them in a pot with a quart of cold water, a sprig of rosemary, and a tiny clove of garlic.
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The covered pot cooked gently for two hours. Toward the end of the time, I chopped an ounce of bacon and a good chunk of a Spanish onion, and softened them in olive oil in a sauté pan.
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After dissolving half a teaspoon of tomato paste in half a cup of homemade broth (rather than the recipe’s bouillon cube) and stirring that into the onion and bacon, I set a food mill over the pan and milled in half the chickpeas.
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Next, in went the whole chickpeas, their remaining cooking water, salt, and enough more water to keep the mixture loose.
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Finally, it was time for the pasta. The recipe calls for “non-egg noodles,” which offers a lot of leeway. I decided to use four ounces of miscela – a mixture of odds and ends of left-over pastas and broken pieces. In Italy, those used to be kept on hand, often for use in soups, so nothing would be wasted. I have a big jar of it in the pantry, originally filled with a purchased bag of miscela, which I keep refreshed with broken-up bits and remnants of other pastas.
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When I added the pasta to the chickpeas, I realized it would have been wiser to start the bacon and onion in a deep saucepan. My sauté pan was so broad and shallow that I could add more water only in small amounts and had to stir almost constantly to prevent the pasta from sticking to the pan.
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Well, I’ll know better next time. It wasn’t a big problem, though – just kept me busier at the stove than I’d have needed to be. And the result was well worth the effort. At the dinner table, we completed our bowls of pasta e ceci to our individual taste with extra-virgin olive oil, freshly ground black pepper, crushed red pepper, and grated parmigiano.
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Before this, I would have said my own version of pasta with chickpeas, from my book The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen, was the absolute best. Now that dish (which I’ve also written about here) will have to share the palm with this one: it’s different from mine, but equally delicious.