Pasta Fagioli --> The origin of Man

That's the type of soup that I had for lunch today - why do you care? I can't imagine that you do. But anyway, I have eaten this soup multiple times - seems that the cooks in the kitchen here take some sort of noodle (it's always different - today it was a large bowtie like noodle) throw it in a pot with some water, through in buckets of what looked like lima beans, a couple of kidney beans and just a tad of seasoning (wouldn't want people to actually taste their food). But I have always wondered what it really should taste like. Rule of thumb - many things in the cafeteria by me are based on a real dish - but execution often leaves much to be desired.

So anyway - Pasta e Fagioli is a tradiational Italian peasant dish made with beans, pasta and a tomato and seasoning base. It can range from a soup to a much thicker dish. One recipe I found for it. Both those sound good - wish I could have had that for lunch. But for more important things what does fagioli mean? Apparently it means beans, usually a white kidney bean, - which is a good thing - because there were a lot of beans in my soup. Fagiolini is the word in Italian for string beans. I have been trying to find the etymology of the word fagioli but having great difficulties - guess I am not a linguist. This is the extent of what I could find on etymology but I couldn't understand it. If anyone understands it - drop me a line. But what I did find that was cool was the Tower of Babel Project. They attempt to find connections between the world's 6000 different languages and finding the origin of these languages. See here for more information. I am humbled by the work they are doing - sounds pretty smart. If you read through that page what's pretty cool is that they learn about the hisotry and the advances of society through the availability of words reflecting different things in their lexicon. Pretty cool - makes sense when you think about it - but I didn't think of that.


Now I am hungry again....