Cook's Illustrated

One-Pot Pasta and Peas

he earliest pasta dishes weren’t the perfectly sauced plates that are common today. Rather, they were humble, brothy soups made by resourceful home cooks who combined water and noodle scraps with dried legumes, stale bread, bits of meat, and whatever else was on hand. According to Danielle Callegari, a historian of Italian food at Dartmouth College, a family would make a batch and keep the pot warm on the stove, enhancing it with more odds and ends as the days passed. It was “a dish of

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