White Beans

Small dried white beans carry fasolada, the soup that gets called the national dish of Greece more often than anything else on the table. It is built from almost nothing: beans, onion, carrot, celery, a little tomato and a genuinely generous quantity of olive oil, simmered until the liquid thickens on the starch released by the beans themselves rather than on any flour or stock.

The same beans go into fasolia yiahni, cooked drier and thicker in tomato and eaten as a main course with bread and raw onion, and both dishes are pillars of Lenten cooking because they need no meat, no dairy and no expense. Cannellini and haricot are the closest widely available substitutes, and either will behave much as a Greek bean does.

Age is what decides the result. Beans more than a year old resist softening no matter how long they simmer, and in hard water areas a pinch of bicarbonate of soda in the soaking water is the traditional fix. Salt goes in at the end, never at the start. Note that fasolia means these dried beans, while fasolakia, a different dish entirely, means fresh green beans.