Rome's republic of soup

Photo by Hossein Farahani on Unsplash

Sometimes, of a Sunday, we make Ceci e pasta. Or Pasta e ceci. The order of the words depends, I suppose, on which bit of the dish you want to emphasise — the pasta or the chickpeas.

When it’s very soupy, the ceci is the life of the dish, but if the pasta dominates, it is more like a stew, one that is rounded out by chickpeas.

The combination of pasta and chickpeas is said to be traditional to Rome with Rome-based English food writer Rachel Roddy writing in The Guardian that “it has a history almost as long as the city itself, dating back at least 2,000 years.” Nigella Lawson, whose recipe for Ceci e pasta first inspired me to try the concoction, offers the same origin story. This seemed to make sense as the remains of chickpeas have been found in the volcanic lava preserved surrounds of Herculaneum, an ancient town destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD. ‘Apicius’, an ancient Roman cookbook is also said to have several chickpea recipes.