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Escarole and White-Bean Soup

If you’re making salad with the tender, inner leaves of a head of escarole, this is a good place to use the tough outer leaves. In fact, they’re even better for this soup. Just remove any bruised or yellow parts of the leaf and shred the rest. If you like, double the amount of beans in this recipe, fish half of them out of the pot after cooking, and save them for the Arugula and White-Bean Salad on page 60. Spoon off all but enough of the cooking liquid barely to cover the remaining beans before adding the escarole and finishing the soup. Whole dried peperoncino or diavolillo peppers are the type of chili peppers that are used, seeds and all, to make the crushed red pepper that you are familiar with. Toasting the whole peppers along with garlic cloves in olive oil brings out their nuttiness and spice. I like to serve them whole right in the soup, where they can be easily spotted and removed.

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