Italian Beans Revamped as Party Snacks

Because sometimes you need things on toast and you need them fast.

IF YOU VISIT THE SALAD LAB here at the Department of Salad, you won’t find a toaster or a toaster oven. This might seem insignificant, especially if your idea of salad is a big bowl of leaves topped by a slice of tomato and a few scraps of celery and carrot— what the boys in the lab refer to as the Salad Emoji Salad. 🥗 The idea being: Who toasts lettuce?

But if you know us at all, you also know that we do not subscribe to the bland idea of salad as just one thing. If anything, salad is like the Hydra constellation that hovers above us in the heavens, with a diversity of purpose so fearsomely endless that mortals could eat a different iteration every single day for the rest of their lives, if they wished.

Constellation Hydra in the night sky. Getty images.

I often have to concentrate with all my might to maintain a neutral expression and calm demeanor when someone says, to my face, “I don’t like salad.” Is this someone I want to engage with? It’s my duty, of course, to right such evil, but sometimes I prefer to instead direct people to this interview I did with the lovely chef and food star Andrew Zimmern, over at his newsletter, Spilled Milk. It is the best encapsulation of my feelings about the topic I can come up with when I am in a state of flummox.

Anyway, it’s a holiday weekend so let’s neither worry nor tarry. Back to the original subject of toasters: I don’t own one because I know myself. I love toast almost as much as I do salad, but in a different way, which I feel could become even more obsessive. I would end up writing a toast newsletter, and unless I knock down some walls in the kitchen and hire more boys that can’t happen.

Toasted on the left; untoasted (raw) on the right.

Anyway, with any kind of healthily burning love comes the occasional need for variety. I do get a tiny bit tired of salad—but only now and then—which usually means I need something on toast or a pot of beans.

So instead of the salad I had planned to give you from Judith Barrett’s 2004 cookbook Fagioli: The Bean Cuisine of Italy—which has just been republished by my friend Steve Sando, of Rancho Gordo— today I have opted to share two dishes from the book that combine my two salad pinch hitters. They are absolutely delicious, simple, and quick treats that you will make again and again, out of hunger and also when you realize you forgot people were coming over and you need appetizers or a big snack to feed them.