Pasta e Fagioli (As Pasquale Would’ve Made It, Kind Of)

By NatLaPirate

When I was a kid, there was a moment — brief, strange, and now extinct — when Canadian state-funded media still believed culture mattered. Not in a “diversity branding” way. In a let people bring their whole selves with them way.

One of the ways they did that was by giving immigrants airtime. Real airtime. On actual television. In Toronto, that meant Pasquale.

Pasquale’s original cooking show ran on local TV in the late 1970s, hosted as La Cucina Italiana con Pasquale on CHIN during Johnny Lombardi’s Sunday Italian programming — bouncing across CITY-TV, Global, and Rogers’ community channel. By the 1980s and early ’90s, he had become a full-blown institution with Pasquale’s Kitchen and Pasquale’s Kitchen Express. Blue smock. White necktie. Red chef’s toque. Singing while he cooked. Pouring wine at the end and feeding a random audience member like it was perfectly normal behavior.

Toronto loved him. So much so that SCTV parodied him — which, in Canada, is basically a knighthood.

Naturally, his cookbook lived in our house.

Also naturally, my mother could never make Pasta e Fagioli properly. My dad loved it. She hated it. It never turned out. Ever. The soup became a recurring disappointment — one of those meals that exists more in hope than in execution.

Then somewhere in my mid-teens, my father asked me to try making it.

Plot twist: my mother loves this soup.

Turns out the problem was never Pasta e Fagioli. It was resentment. And timing. And possibly the fact that some dishes don’t respond well to spite.

Context: What Pasta e Fagioli Actually Is

Pasta e Fagioli — literally pasta and beans — comes out of Italy’s cucina povera, the working-class tradition of making real food from what you had, not what looked good on a menu. Beans were cheap, filling, and widely available; pasta stretched meals and fed families. The dish exists in dozens of regional variations across Italy, thicker in some areas, more brothy in others, sometimes with tomatoes, sometimes without, sometimes finished with olive oil, sometimes pork fat.

In Southern Italy, especially around Naples and Campania, the dish is often referred to in dialect as pasta e fasule. When Italian immigrants brought it to North America, that dialect came with them — eventually morphing into the very North American “pasta fazool.”

It was never meant to be precious.

It was meant to be enough.

Which explains why it works best when you stop rushing it.

This is not “Italian-inspired.”This is Italian judgment in a pot.

If you rush it, it will know.

If you disrespect it, it will taste like sadness.

When I make this soup now, I’m not trying to recreate television nostalgia or impress anyone who thinks food should come with foam. I’m making it the way my father would have approved of: slowly, confidently, and without apologizing for the fact that it’s simple.

Pasta e Fagioli doesn’t reward shortcuts. It rewards patience. It wants time. It wants the flavors to settle, to argue a little, to come back together stronger. Much like families. Much like immigrants. Much like anyone trying to feel at home in a place that didn’t start out feeling like it belonged to them.

Mom’s tune changed after that first go at it: from that moment on, she would just ask when I’d be making it again.

And honestly?

That’s victory enough.