The Classic Italian Comfort Food Dean Martin Loved So Much He Sang About It

Of the many entries on the list of essential words and phrases to know when dining in an Italian restaurant, we bet "pasta fagioli" is a familiar one. Rat Packer Dean Martin loved pasta fagioli so much that he included a reference to it in one of his hit songs. While everyone knows the iconic first line of "That's Amore," which favorably compares the moon to a big pizza pie, not everyone knows that the second verse goes, "When the stars make you drool just like a pasta fazool, that's amore."

Martin's daughter Deana divulged in an interview with "Hallmark Channel Home & Family" that Dean's specific fall-in-love pasta fagioli was the one his mother Angela made. While the exact ingredients in a "proper" pasta fagioli are up for debate, the Martin family's version featured white beans, no garlic, no tomatoes, and an unexpected star ingredient: cinnamon. You hear Dino singing the name of the soup as "fazool" because that's the phonetic representation of the soup's name uttered in a New York accent. Just picture Carmela Soprano waxing poetic about gabagool and moozadell! While we've heard of adding flavor to soup with unexpected ingredients, a proud Nonna's pasta fagioli/fazool is already so tasty that it needs nothing extra.

The name "pasta fagioli" translates to "pasta and beans," but, beyond that brief, there's a lot — and we do mean a lot — of room for interpretation when it comes to making the dish. Since it's made all over Italy, there are regional differences in ingredients, but some variations have to do with family tradition as well. Two different possible origin stories for pasta fagioli point in completely different directions: Hungry sailors making use of non-perishable goods on long seagoing voyages versus monks using the bounty of their seasonal gardens. No matter what is put into a "traditional" pasta fagioli, evidence points to it being a good way to use what was available... just like Italian ribollita soup, which utilizes stale bread.

The version that Dean's mother made, is a unique white pasta fagioli with no tomatoes and only cannellini beans, which are also pale. We've seen modern-day spins on a white pasta fagioli that also add pancetta for smokiness, although that doesn't seem to be the goal of the Martin family recipe, as the cinnamon would have instead lent warmth and complexity to the bowl. Northern and Central Italy are known for their bianco pasta e fagioli; it's the southern region of the boot that gave us the tomato-y spin. Dean Martin's dad, Gaetano Crocetti, was born in Montesilvano, Provincia di Pescara, Abruzzo, Italy, in the central part of the country, so the white fagioli tracks!