Crema di Fave alla Pugliese

This is what Italian food actually is. Not restaurant cooking with its cream sauces and excess. This is a pot of dried beans, an onion, some water, and your best olive oil. It fed families in Puglia for centuries before anyone thought to call it cuisine.

The dried fava bean was the protein of the poor. Contadini in the sun-scorched heel of Italy's boot grew them, dried them, stored them, and cooked them into this simple puree all winter long. They served it with whatever bitter greens grew wild in the fields: chicory, dandelion, the leaves of the turnip. The combination of creamy beans and sharp greens was nutritionally complete. It kept people alive.

What you keep out matters as much as what you put in. There is no garlic here. No herbs beyond one bay leaf. No vegetable soffritto. The flavor is the bean itself, transformed by slow cooking and elevated by the olive oil of Puglia, which is among the finest in Italy. If you use inferior oil, you will taste it. If you rush the cooking, the beans will be grainy. Simple does not mean easy.