45 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Interpretation of Italian Cuisine. Highly Recommended, October 16, 2004
This review is from: Marcella Cucina (Hardcover)
Reading `Marcella Cucina', the fourth book by culinary educator Marcella Hazan doubles my dispair at not reading her sooner, especially after just having read and reviewed her latest book, `Marcella Says'. This is not to say that the dozens of other books I have read on Italian cuisine are not good, it is just that Ms. Hazan is so obviously among the cream of the crop, I would have been a better judge of those other books if I had digested Ms. Hazan before sitting down at the table with Batalli, Bastianich, Bugialli, and a legion of Italian regional specialist writers plus all the writers covering the Mediterranean as a whole.
This book has just a slightly less concentrated level of wisdom than the latest work, but you definitely deserve to own and read both if you are fond of Italian cooking. There is some overlap, but this volume is definitely superior to `Marcella Says' in several regards, especially in the very well illustrated instructions on making fresh pasta by hand.
As the title suggests, `Marcella Cucina' is about the cooking which Ms. Hazan does in the privacy of her own kitchen. That is not to say that all the recipes are Hazan inventions constructed from whole cloth. My sense is that about half of the recipes are from native Italian cooks and professional chefs and about half are inventions of Ms. Hazan. But, even the inventions are so true to the spirit of the Italian table that you can hardly tell the difference. Ms. Hazan professes to be a great believer in the principle of `terroir', or things that grow together, go together. She has little use for fusion cooking. On the other hand, while she is a native of Emilia-Romagna and a resident of Venice when this book was written, Ms. Hazan takes her inspirations from all over the Italian peninsula, from Genoa and Venice in the north to Sicily in the south to Sardinia in the west.
I always thought it ironic that my great culinary hero Mario Batali would constantly mention how so much of the Italian cuisine was based on poverty, and how, therefore, so much of the Italian cuisine was vegetarian, with meat being used more as a condiment than as a major source of protein. Yet, every `Molto Mario' show seemed to feature a dish involving a large hunk of pork or chicken or beef or lamb or veal, even if it was a `poor man's cut' such as the pig's jowl or the lamb's shoulder. Ms. Hazan does not commit that anomaly. Her subjects, in order of greatest to least number of recipes are:
Pasta, including a 13 page essay with pictures on how to make fresh egg pasta using a manual pasta machine, a dowel rolling pin, and the Maccheroni alla Chitarra of Abruzzi. Like all great writers on Italian cuisine, Ms. Hazan does not look down on dry pasta. Fresh and dry pasta are two different products enhanced by two different types of sauces. She does look down on fresh supermarket pastas artificially kept soft with additives. She recommends fresh homemade pasta left to dry to soft supermarket fare doped with artificial ingredients. I love the Anglo-Italiaphile recipes from Jamie Oliver and the River Café, as they are typically both delicious and simple, but Ms. Hazan is the real deal. She gives us 27 different pasta sauces based on tomato, dairy, and olive oil from Liguria, Sardinia, Venice, Naples, and the hunter's cabin in the Apennines. After reading this chapter, I find it hard to even look at a commercially bottled pasta sauce without a guilty conscience. This very long chapter ends with eight very special recipes for stuffed pastas such as raviolis, tortellonis, and pies.
Vegetables, the European Mediterranean coast's gift to the world's cuisine. While the Slavs make the most of the simple green head cabbage, the Italians glorify all manner of cruciform veggies. Add to this their love of beans, artichokes, celery, radicchio, zucchini, eggplant, peppers, and wild mushrooms, and you wonder that they ever missed meat. As tomatoes are a minor player in this chapter, you can get a good sense of what the Italian table was like before the discovery of the New World. The introductory chapter on shopping at the Venetian Rialto market makes me instantly jealous of those who live in Venice.
Appetizers, with a special emphasis on frittatas and stuffed vegetables. Aside from the first recipe for the Friuli frico, there are few familiar recipes here. Many, to my knowledge, are seen in this book for the first time. A highlight of this chapter is a delightful recipe for `Sardinian Sheet Music Bread', a semolina flatbread related to pita.
Meat, including veal, beef, lamb, and pork, with a selection of involtini (rolled meat) breaded scaloppini's, stews, braises, roasts, and boils.
Fish, with a remarkable absence of recipes for salt cod. The featured proteins are scallops, swordfish, squid, bluefish, and salmon. Yum!
Soups, especially the simple ministre style of peasant soup, with most recipes featuring one type of bean and one type of green. All soups use the simple meat brodo rather than the French stock. None of these soups are thickened by puree and Ms. Hazan is explicitly opposed to thickening by roux.
Salads, including some new and some old. I forgive Ms. Hazan for including a recipe for two different versions of the Caprese salad because she included two new potato salad recipes.
Desserts. All the usual fruit, cream, nut, custard, and gelato suspects.
Poultry and Rabbit make me wish rabbit was more commonly available in my local megamart.
Risotto and Polenta. Enough said.
If one were to learn nothing else from this book, it would be to concentrate on letting ingredients speak for themselves with a bit of help from salt rather than loading them up with garlic and other condiments.
My judgment so far is that you cannot own too many books by Marcella Hazan.
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