beans talk; On a quest for the elusive perfectly cooked bean, Jeffrey Steingarten makes three earthshaking discoveries.

Byline: Jeffrey Steingarten

What a fiasco," I exclaimed under my breath, chuckling appreciatively. "What a fiasco," I repeated. I liked the sound of it.

In Italy, a fiasco is, among other things, a flask, a wine bottle, often the type wrapped in wicker and later recycled as a candlestick on a slippery red-checkered oilcloth in a modest American Italian restaurant where you can get an eight-inch-tall lasagna that oozes uncontrollably under your fork before toppling over. But in Tuscany, where the people are known as mangia fagioli, "bean eaters," a fiasco is what people once cooked beans in-white cannellini and toscanelli beans, earthy borlotti-all night ...