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Pasta e fagioli or pasta fagioli, meaning "pasta and beans", is a traditional meatless Italian dish. Like many other Italian favorites including pizza and polenta, the dish started as a peasant dish, due to cheaply available beans and pasta. Today it can be widely found, even in restaurants that do not feature Italian cuisine. It is also called pasta fazool or pastafazool in today's Italian-American slang. Pasta fagioli is made using cannellini beans or borlotti beans and some type of small pasta such as elbow macaroni or ditalini. The base is generally olive oil, garlic, minced onion, and spices, along with stewed tomatoes or tomato paste, or traditionally, in home recipes, the leftover sauce from Sunday marinara. Some variations do not include tomatoes at all, and are made from a broth. The consistency of the dish can vary, as some renditions fall clearly in the soup category, usually because the tomato was left out, while others are much thicker. The word for "beans" is different in different Italian dialects, e.g. fagioli ([fa'd???li]) in standard Italian, [fa'su?l] in Neapolitan, and [fa'su?lu] in Sicilian. The American slang spelling "fazool" probably came from the Neapolitan word. Pastafazoola, a 1927 novelty song by Van and Schenck, capitalizes on this latter pronunciation in the rhyme, "Don't be a fool, eat pasta fazool."[1] (The Italian adjective fasullo/fasulla/fasulli/fasulle, meaning "fake" or "bogus", has a very similar pronuciation; but its connection to "fazool" is unclear.)
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