Fasolada Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Fasolada is a plain soup of white beans simmered in olive oil with vegetables. In Greece it is everyday home cooking and a Lenten fasting dish, and it is often spoken of as a national dish.

Its central ingredient, the white bean (Phaseolus vulgaris), is a New World crop, and it did not spread across the Atlantic into Europe until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Olive oil and vegetables were long at hand around the Mediterranean, but until this white bean crossed the sea and took root in Greek kitchens, the fasolada we know today had no way of coming into being. Once the bean arrived, the soup as it is now known took shape.

The cooking itself is simple. The beans and vegetables are quietly simmered in olive oil, with no special technique and no costly ingredient. A soup that filled the stomach cheaply, it settled easily into daily meals.

Fasolada is often given an ancient pedigree. It is said to begin with the bean dish offered to Apollo at the Pyanopsia, the festival known as the 'day of the bean soup,' and even to reach back to the legend of Theseus.

But this pedigree cannot stand as the origin of the fasolada eaten today. Its present central ingredient, the white bean, is a New World crop and was not present in ancient Greece. As archaeologists have pointed out, the bean dishes offered at the ancient festival were soups of other legumes, such as fava beans, different in their very main ingredient from a white-bean fasolada. An origin story that binds the ancient dish and the present one as one and the same does not hold.

None of this denies the antiquity of bean soup as a kind of dish. Boiling and eating beans is an old custom. But that was a different dish with a different bean, better understood as an early layer that lies behind, rather than a direct ancestor of, the white-bean fasolada. Even the language of a national dish was strengthened only in the twentieth century. During the German occupation and the hardship of the postwar years, the soup was eaten widely as a cheap source of nourishment, and it was in that period that its standing as a national dish took hold. For all the old pedigree it wears, the soup loved today is a comparatively recent tradition.