Customer Reviews

Marcella Cucina

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I adore this cookbook. The photographs are beautiful, the story behind each recipe is fascinating, the explanations are clear and the results are superb. I am awed by Marcella Hazan's ability to take simple ingredients and create fantastic results with sheer technique and attention to details, such as slicing vs. chopping garlic, sauteing certain ingredients for a long time and adding others for a short time, using butter here and olive oil there and even just plain vegetable oil at other times. There are two summer pasta sauces with nearly identical ingredients, and, as Marcella points out, completely different results. I have made almost all of the sauces and none have been less than delicious. I have discovered the joy of pancetta thanks to this book. I have learned how to make risotto, very good and not all that difficult. Now I am venturing into the meats - the beef stew with capers, cornichons and pancetta was amazing. I have learned alot about good cooking from this book, and not just of Italian food. Marcella's cooking is alive and accessible and completely masterful at the same time.

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.

I received this book in error because I didn't send back the card to my book club (sorry Amazon) in time. Well, I couldn't be happier. Being an Italian (and an italian cook), I am always looking for new and exciting recipes. Generally, I buy a cookbook, find recipes and modify them for improvement. Mrs. Hazan's recipes are wonderful. No modification necessary. The recipes are simple with few ingredients that are key for incredible flavor. Her writing is both intelligent and eloquent, a rarity for cookbooks. I have many italian cookbooks and they pale in comparison. Last night I prepared her pasta with cherry tomatoes, scallions and chili peppers. It was sooo good. Who would think that 24 scallions can be so subtle and delicious. Molto bene. I am about to order her other books. Mangiare!! .

This book is simply the best Italian cookbook ever made; it contains good, affordable recipes and directions that are the most complete that I have ever used.

Covers: Marcella's thoughts on ingredients and buying them, appetizers, soups, pasta (making and sauce) risotto and polenta, fish, poultry and rabbit, meat, vegetables, salads and desserts.

I liked the book, I find the recipes easy to follow and pretty tasty. I especially liked the beginning info on olive oil, and parmesan cheese. The book is not a northern italian or southern italian cookbook, it's sort of a mix of all over Italy, which is something to keep in mind. The pictures are very nice, and the quality of the book binding is very sound.

I love this book. One of the things that makes food in Italy so delicious is they use and combine whatever ingredients happen to be in season. Marcella follows this tradition. I love to pick recipes out of this book and find that everything it calls for is available in my garden, and I can pick fresh and cook.

The only cookbook that I remember the name of the author. Once you make bluefish and potatoes or pork chops with capers and anchovies you will remember her name too. (Actually I think the pork chop was supposed to be veal but we substituted. Her recipes are easily manipulated.)

Her husband liked broccoli stems so she found a way to make them. Cut up like matchsticks I have never thrown those stems away since.

Marcella fans the world over have almost certainly already added this new book to their kitchen bookshelf with the other oil and tomato sauce-splattered volumes from the deliciously intolerant queen of the Italian kitchen. Fame and glory have clearly had an effect on Marcella. Scorn for food fads, French cooking, vegetarians, or even people vaguely concerned about eating too much salt, have always made her the most entertaining and politically incorrect food writer in the world. But here she goes even further. Marcella Cucina reveals the Marcella id in all its glory and introduces the previously shadowy figure of her husband Victor as a key figure in an Italian culinary psychodrama. The book begins in the usual way with a little essay about the basic ingredients of Italian cooking which is full of the trademark Marcella irritation with ignorant oafs and their idiotic ideas. Take this delightful running kick aimed squarely at anti-butter health nuts, "I am dismayed by the misguided attitude of those who champion olive oil over butter as though it were a cause. How do they make the sauces for their homemade pasta, I'd like to know, or the bases for most risottos? How indeed. Or this head butt to American and English bread eaters "(In America and England)...one slathers it with butter or, in the current lamentable fashion, dunks it in olive oil...We would find it grotesque to waste good olive oil by pouring it into saucers for dipping bread". You go girl! Marcella Cucina contains more recipes in the style of all her previous books. This is one of the wonderful things about the world of Marcella Hazan - its constancy. She is, by her own admission, not interested in "fusion of cross-cultural culinary hybrids" but rather in communicating a clear sense of place. Hers is regional cooking by definition and as such there are few surprises. However, I am glad to see some more rabbit dishes. There is only one other rabbit recipe in any of her books (stewed rabbit with white wine from her first book) and, the few times I have tried it, it was uncharacteristically mediocre. There is an amazing selection of salads and soups here and most of them - like the swiss chard, cannellini bean and barley soup that is simmering as I write - sound wonderful. But what of Victor "for and because of" whom these recipes were created? He crops up unexpectedly all over the place as a dark Svengali figure; the demiurge behind the Marcella experience. Marcella cucina but Victor wears the pants. Readers of her previous books will be familiar with the story of how Marcella learned to cook. A young wife in a foreign city with an important husband out at work all day on lofty missions, she didn't know how to cook and felt inadequate. Not that she hadn't been a career woman mind you, but she had given all that up to please Victor. But if she couldn't cook, how was she going to keep her man happy? Why, by spending countless hours in the kitchen trying to recreate the tastes of her childhood. This oft-told story has always seemed charming in a retro kind of way, but here it is expanded and begins to take on darker overtones: "After (Victor) left in the morning, the days were long and lonely and often I was desperate". She tells us how she planned and cooked a complete Italian meal every day to please Victor when he returned from work. "I described how I made each dish and my husband complimented me on the ones that were successful and, happily less often, consoled me when they were not, suggesting how they might be improved." Victor is a formidable taskmaster who knows how to treat a woman. A recipe for Tuscan beans is attributed to a former housekeeper of his who clearly enjoyed his dominant ways. Marcella tells us that when Victor asked the submissive servant to clean his apartment and cook for him "her face shone as though she had just been awakened from a bad dream by the good prince". But clearly Marcella herself is not always so charmed by his peremptory arrogance. The same recipe opens with the following exchange between Marcella and Victor: ""What do you want to eat today?" I ask my husband. It seems to me a very sweet, solicitous question for a wife to pose, but it never fails to irritate Victor. "I can't think about it now," he usually snaps." Poor Marcella.

I bought this book thru Amazon before it was distributed in New Zealand and recommended to friends to get this book when it came out here. The recipes are great - easy to follow and taste fantastic. Many of the pasta sauces are easy and quick to do after a long day at work, and I save the long slow cooking ones for the weekend. The prawn & orange salad is fantastic - great for a summertime Christmas, and the peach, berry and sparkling wine fruit salad is also a big hit. Veal patties, fricassed chicken, vegetables..I could go on. Just a note on the political correctness comments - Marcella was a woman of her time and culture - different from modern New Zealanders and Americans, so cooking for her husband should be put in context. Anyway, cooking food is about love for your family and friends and I think that is what she was focusing on rather than 'serving her husband'.

The Fricassed Chicken with Olives and Cherry Tomatoes alone is worth the price of this book. It is fabulous, and is worthy of any dinner party. And so simple in the Hazan tradition. I didn't like the scallion pasta, but generally you cannot go wrong with this book. And as for Marcella cooking for her family, well, I think if there were more of it in the world we would all be better off.