The Story Behind This Recipe

In the summer of 1982, I met a boy with dark curls that fell into his eyes when he laughed and hands that smelt permanently of garlic.

He worked evenings in his family’s tiny restaurant, tucked down a side street I would never find again on my own. I only went in because it was raining.

I ordered the cheapest thing on the menu, and he brought me a bowl of Pasta e Fagioli and corrected my terrible pronunciation with exaggerated horror.

Then he sat beside me after the dinner rush and drew maps on paper napkins of all the places I “absolutely could not leave Italy without seeing.”

I was eighteen, I had finished my school exams and was spending the summer before university backpacking around Italy with my money hidden in my bra and exactly no idea what I wanted from life

He seemed to think that was wonderful. That I was special.

He worked until midnight most nights, but somehow, he would still appear outside my hostel on his motorbike every morning. We spent whole days wandering through tiny towns, drinking bitter coffee in sunlit piazzas, swimming in rivers, and getting lost on purpose.

One day he taught me how to make Pasta e Fagioli in a tiny rustic kitchen overlooking his family’s vegetable garden. “Because” he said seriously, “in a few weeks you’ll be a very poor student.” I told him I planned to become sophisticated and glamorous at university. He laughed so hard he nearly choked. I think he knew me better than I did!

And just like that the summer was over. He kissed me at the airport. One hand on my face like he was memorising it.

“We had a beautiful summer,” he said.

Not “we will see each other soon“.

Not “I love you“.

But the truth, we had had a beautiful summer. And somehow that hurt more.

I cried on the plane home. Not dramatic film tears. Quiet ones. The kind you hide by staring out of the window.

I spent a week getting myself sorted before heading to Durham to start my English degree and Luca was right! For three years I was a very poor student and there was no hint of sophistication.

I made pasta and beans regularly!

For two years I used a dented saucepan that had come with our rental house, the handle would wobble every time I stirred the pan and nearly every time I made it my housemate would say it smelt “too garlicky,” which honestly proved to me that she cannot be trusted around cooking. Then she would eat at least two bowls and ask me to cook it again soon. She is still my closest friend, and I am not sure she uses her kitchen. Cooking is not her thing. But she can arrange flowers effortlessly!

I made the soup through the cold winters (northern England is brutal), where we would sit under blankets because we couldn’t afford the heating. By the end of university, that summer in Italy was a distant memory.

When I finished my degree, I went on to train to be an English teacher. I met Tom at a party. He was the brother of a boy on my teaching course, he was older, had a job and I fell hard. We got married and built a life together with two beautiful children, Ben and Emily. I would make pasta and beans for the children when they were little. It was always one of my comfort meals.

After almost twenty years together and 15 years of marriage, Tom left and for five years it was just the children and I. As a single mum I fell back on beans whenever I needed to save a little money.

Then suddenly life changed again. The kids left home for university and the house was unbearably empty! There was no noise from the bedrooms upstairs, no wet towels on the bathroom floor, no slammed doors, no one to cook for. Just me. I cooked for myself, because I had to eat, but it was always something simple and some nights it was just toast. Friday nights was always a takeaway and then Sunday I would make myself Pasta e Fagioli, curl up on the sofa and read all afternoon.

I thought I would enjoy the freedom of no kids at home, but mostly I felt untethered. Like everyone else got instructions for this stage of life and mine were lost in the post. For my birthday I booked a trip to London. A musical. Shopping. Nice hotel. Four days for me. On day three, after wandering Covent Garden in the rain, I ducked into a small Italian restaurant for lunch.

And there he was.

Older, of course.

Silver at his temples. Lines around his eyes. But still unmistakably him.

Luca.

For one terrifying moment I thought perhaps I had romanticised that summer into something bigger than it really was.

Then he looked up from behind the counter. And smiled like no time had passed at all.

I sat there all afternoon, in his restaurant, reading my kindle, chatting when he was free. Then we talked for five hours straight after the restaurant closed.

Five hours. About everything and nothing. About children and divorce and grief and work and aging parents and dreams that change shape over time. I told him that my current dream was to go part time at work and write a book.

At one point he took me to the kitchen so we could make some supper. He suggested Pasta e Fagioli and said “I thought, you might still need cheap food if you are going to give up work.”

I laughed so hard I cried.

Then I actually cried.

Real tears this time.

Because life is strange and heartbreaking and beautiful. Because I had loved him in some quiet hidden corner of myself for over thirty years without even realising it.

We got married in 2018.

I was fifty-four years old and I know that eighteen-year-old me could never had imagined this ending!

Pasta e Fagioli will always be my soul food. It has meant so many things to me throughout my life. At eighteen it was the food of adventure, of freedom and first love. At uni it was survival food that was cheap and filling. As a mother it was family food, cooked with love and exhaustion. And as a single woman in her late forties, it was a dish that reminded me of the past and brought me comfort.

And then, after finding Luca again, it became something entirely new. Proof that some parts of our lives never truely leave us.