White beans with tomatoes and sage is a recipe worth savoring
This recipe comes from the Eat Voraciously newsletter. Sign up here to get one weeknight dinner recipe, tips for substitutions, techniques and more in your inbox Monday through Thursday.
A scarpetta, in Italian, is a small shoe. But it has another definition, which I prefer: The scrap of bread you drag over the bottom of a dish, to clean up any lingering swipes of sauce or soup. It’s a useful and delicious thing, a last bite that sings. And you’re going to want a scarpetta when you serve this recipe, a dish of creamy cannellini beans in a sage-infused tomato sauce.
It’s from “Via Carota: A Celebration of Seasonal Cooking from the Beloved Greenwich Village Restaurant” by Jody Williams and Rita Sodi, with Anna Kovel. I love Via Carota. I love the warm lighting and wooden chairs, the marble bar and white china. As a former New York resident, I’m lucky to have eaten there many times — alone at the bar with a plate of pasta and glass of wine and at a table with half a dozen friends where we shared all of the vegetable dishes and the entire dessert menu.
Advertisement
It’s a special place for a lot of people, but Via Carota is especially dear to its owners. In fact, it’s a love story, which they tell in the book’s introduction: For 15 years, Sodi maintained a home on Via del Carota in Bagno a Ripoli, in the southeast of Florence, beginning when she worked in fashion. Williams and Sodi met at Sodi’s first restaurant, I Sodi. A few years later, Williams opened her own place, Buvette, also in the neighborhood, and the pair married. They spent years working at their restaurants, though they occasionally stole away to their restored 17th-century stone villa in Florence, sharing meals on the 10-foot chestnut table near the wood-burning hearth.
But in the early 2010s, with their restaurants packed every night, Sodi and Williams grew too busy to visit their villa. They decided to sell it — and open another restaurant together in New York. “Jody jokes that we opened Via Carota on Grove Street so we could actually see each other,” Sodi writes. Indeed, the restaurant forced them back into the same kitchen and brought a little bit of that stone villa magic to New York City.
One of the many things the two women have in common is their love for simple vegetable dishes. “We prefer a table full of vegetables. … We always want more vegetables, more tastes and textures. We crave antipasti, salads, beans, and vegetables. They are the triumphs of the season, each emphasizing one ingredient. Importantly, they are also for sharing,” they write in their book. And so what follows is a seasonal tour through the vegetables, herbs, beans and fruits of each season — with a few meatier dishes and beverages sprinkled in between. Not only are dishes like ramps with pancetta and polenta; shaved raw white asparagus with aged balsamic; marinated green tomatoes with bottarga; and Brussels sprouts salad with walnuts and apples wonderful to eat and share, with a singular vegetable’s flavor at their center, but they’re remarkably easy to make and memorize.
Advertisement
For this, Fagioli all’Uccelletto, Cannellini With Sage, Tomato and Sausage, you saute crumbled Italian sausage in olive oil with crushed garlic cloves and fresh sage. Once the sausage is browned, add a large can of crushed tomatoes and cook until the sauce is thick and glossy. Stir in a few cups of cooked cannellini beans and finish the dish in the oven, so that the sauce caramelizes on the edges of the pan and the beans pick up the flavor of the sausage and sage. I made the dish twice and have now committed it to memory. Each time, I served it with a loaf of crusty bread for dipping, scooping — and for a scarpetta to clean the bottom of the bowl.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLOwu8NoaWlqYmR%2Bc3uQbmacmZ6jsq24yKegZpqVlru0edGemqKolWLDqq2MnJirp6SWfA%3D%3D