Fagioli all'uccelletto with sausage and rustic bread

Fagioli all'uccelletto translates litreally as beans in the style of the little bird, which is a poetic and slightly confusing name for a dish that contains no bird whatsoever. The theory goes that Tuscans used to cook small game birds in tomato sauce with sage and garlic, and when the game ran out they kept the sauce but swapped the birds for beans, because Tuscans have always been resourceful and beans are cheaper than pheasant. The beans absorb the tomato and the sage, the sage pretends it is in a grown-up dish, and the whole thing becomes the lazy student's hot dinner par excellence.

This was the dish that got us through the broken-heating winter of our final year of university. We had a flat with single-glazed windows, a radiator that made aggressive clunking noises without actually producing warmth, and a grocery budget that could best be described as principally beans. Fagioli all'uccelletto became the Tuesday night standard, then the Thursday night standard, then the Saturday night standard when we were too broke to go to the pub. We would sit on the cold kitchen floor next to the radiator, a bowl on each lap, a thick slice of bread in each hand, and declare it the best meal of the week. It might actually have been.

In the Tuscan tradition this is a vegetarian dish, usually served as a side to a grilled pork chop or a piece of sausage. We have folded a couple of crumbled Italian pork sausages directly into the beans to push it from side to complete meal, because the book demands complete meals and because a plate of just beans, no matter how delicious, asks you a question at 11pm that the beans can't really answer. If you are strictly vegetarian, leave the sausage out, double the beans, and add a fatter piece of bread. Either way, eat it in a cold kitchen with the heating on the blink, for full effect.