Marcella Hazan - Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking : A Cookbook

Also by Marcella Hazan

The Classic Italian Cook Book

More Classic Italian Cooking

Marcellas Italian Kitchen

Marcella Cucina

Marcella Says

Amarcord

a note about the author

M arcella H azan was born in Cesenatico, a fishing village on the Adriatic in Emilia-Romagna, Italys foremost gastronomic region. After receiving her doctorates from the University of Ferrara in natural sciences and in biology, she lived and traveled throughout Italy. In 1967 she and her husband, Victor, an Italian-born American, came to New York, and shortly thereafter she started giving lessons in Italian cooking in her New York apartment. With the publication of The Classic Italian Cook Book, her reputation as Americas premier teacher of northern Italian cooking spread throughout the country. Her second cookbook, More Classic Italian Cooking, was published in 1978 to broad acclaim, and the school she opened in Bologna, Italy, drew students from throughout the world. In 1986, her third book, Marcellas Italian Kitchen, was published. Hazan taught cooking classes in Venice, where she lived on the top floor of a sixteenth-century palazzo she and her husband had restored. She died in 2013.

Fundamentals

Where Flavor Starts

F lavor, in Italian dishes, builds up from the bottom. It is not a cover, it is a base. In a pasta sauce, a risotto, a soup, a fricassee, a stew, or a dish of vegetables, a foundation of flavor supports, lifts, points up the principal ingredients. To grasp this architectural principle central to the structure of much Italian cooking, and to become familiar with the three key techniques that enable you to apply it, is to take a long step toward mastering Italian taste. The techniques are known as battuto, soffritto, and insaporire.

battuto

The name comes from the verb battere, which means to strike, and it describes the cut-up mixture of ingredients produced by striking them on a cutting board with a chopping knife. At one time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsley, and onion, all chopped very fine. Garlic, celery, or carrot might be included, depending on the dish. The principal change that contemporary usage has brought is the substitution of olive oil or butter for lard, although many country cooks still depend on the richer flavor of the latter. However formulated, a battuto is at the base of virtually every pasta sauce, risotto or soup, and of numberless meat and vegetable dishes.

soffritto

When a battuto is sauted in a pot or skillet until the onion becomes translucent and the garlic, if any, becomes colored a pale gold, it turns into a soffritto. This step precedes the addition of the main ingredients, whatever they may be. Although many cooks make a soffritto by sauting all the components of the battuto at one time, it makes for more careful cooking to keep the onion and the garlic separate. The onion is sauted first, when it becomes translucent the garlic is added, and when the garlic becomes colored, the rest of the battuto. The reasons are two: one, if you start by sauting the onion, you are creating a richer base of flavor in which to saut the battuto; two, because onion takes longer to saut than garlic, if you were to put both in at the same time, by the time the onion became translucent the garlic would be too dark. If, however, your battuto recipe calls for pancetta, cook the onion and pancetta together to make use of the pancettas fat, thus reducing the need for other shortening.

An imperfectly executed soffritto will impair the flavor of a dish no matter how carefully all the succeeding steps are carried out. If the onion is merely stewed or incompletely sauted, the taste of the sauce, or the risotto, or the vegetable never takes off and will remain feeble. If the garlic is allowed to become dark, its pungency will dominate all other flavors.

Note A battuto usually, but not invariably, becomes a soffritto. Occasionally, you combine it with the other ingredients of the dish as is, in its raw state, a crudo, to use the Italian phrase. This is a practice one resorts to in order to produce less emphatic flavor, such as, for example, in making a roast of lamb in which the meat cooks along with the battuto a crudo from the start. Another example is pesto, a true battuto a crudo, although, perhaps because it has traditionally been pounded with a pestle rather than chopped with a blade, it is not always recognized as such. Yet there are many Italian cooks who, in referring to any battuto, might say they are making a pestino, a little pesto.

insaporire

The step that follows a soffritto is called insaporire, bestowing taste. It usually applies to vegetables, inasmuch as, in Italian cooking, vegetables are the critical ingredient in most first coursespastas, soups, risottiand in many fricassees and stews, and often constitute an important course on their own. But the step may also apply to the ground meat that is going to be turned into a meat sauce or meat loaf, or to rice, when it is toasted in the soffritto as a preliminary to making risotto. As you become aware of it, you will spot it in countless recipes.

The technique of insaporire requires that you add the vegetables or other principal ingredients to the soffritto base and, over very lively heat, briskly saut them until they have become completely coated with the flavor elements of the base, particularly the chopped onion. One can often trace the unsatisfying taste, the lameness of dishes purporting to be Italian in style, to the reluctance of some cooks to execute this step thoroughly, to their failure to give it enough time over sufficient heat, or even to their skipping it altogether.

sauting with butter and oil

A soffritto is sometimes executed with olive oil as the only fat, but on those occasions when one might find the flavor of olive oil intrusive Italian cooks use butter together with neutral-tasting vegetable oil. Combining the two enables one to saut at a higher temperature without scorching the butter or having to clarify it.

The Components

anchovies

Acciughe

Of all the ingredients used in Italian cooking, none produces headier flavor than anchovies. It is an exceptionally adaptable flavor that accommodates itself to any role one wishes to assign it. Chopped anchovy dissolving into the cooking juices of a roast divests itself of its explicit identity while it contributes to the meats depth of taste. When brought to the foreground, as in a sauce for pasta or with melted mozzarella, anchovys stirring call takes absolute command of our taste buds. Anchovies are indispensable to bagna cada, the Piedmontese dip for raw vegetables, and to various forms of salsa verde, the piquant green sauces served with boiled meats or fish.

What anchovies to get and how to prepare them The meatier anchovies are, the richer and rounder is their flavor. The meatiest anchovies are the ones kept under salt in large tins and sold individually, by weight. One-quarter pound is, for most purposes, an ample quantity to buy at one time. Prepare the fillets as follows:

Rinse the whole anchovies under cold running water to remove as much as possible of the salt used to preserve them.

Take one anchovy at a time, grasping it by the tail and, with the other hand, use a knife gently to scrape off all its skin. After skinning it, remove the dorsal fin along with the tiny bones attached to it.