Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [1]
I have applied myself with all the diligence I could muster to reworking the section on yeast doughs, where you now have improved doughs for bread, new doughs for focaccia and pizza, and as an entirely fresh entry, one of the greatest of Italian regional loaves, Apulia’s olive bread.
The microwave oven has become such a ubiquitous appliance that I had dearly hoped to incorporate here suggestions for its use but, I regret, those who like to cook by this method will have to look elsewhere. I have tried again and again, but the microwave does not produce for me the satisfying textures, the vigorous, well-integrated flavors that I look for in Italian cooking. This is aside from the fact that the oven’s principal advantage, that of speed, declines precipitously when cooking for more than one. I believe with my whole heart in the act of cooking, in its smells, in its sounds, in its observable progress on the fire. The microwave separates the cook from cooking, cutting off the emotional and physical pleasure deeply rooted in the act, and not even with its swiftest and neatest performance can the push-button wizardry of the device compensate for such a loss.
Early on, when the full scope of the task of revision began to be visible, it became clear that the sensible approach was to pull the contents of The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking together into a single broad-ranging volume. Having done so, the advantage became most apparent in the new pasta section: The chapters from the two earlier books have been consolidated and expanded to form one of the fullest and most detailed collections of recipes for pasta sauces and pasta dishes in print. It is preceded now by a completely reformulated introduction to homemade pasta that I hope will lead more cooks to discover how easily and quickly they can make homemade pasta in the classic Bolognese style, and how much better it is than any fresh pasta they can buy. Equally extensive are the sections on soups, risotto, fish, and vegetables, far more complete and more informative than in either of the two preceding books.
There is an entirely new chapter called Fundamentals, a mini-encyclopedia of Italian food. It is densely packed with information about cooking techniques and the herbs and cheeses used in an Italian kitchen, it has the recipes for several very useful basic sauces, and it tells how to choose and use such ingredients as balsamic vinegar, bottarga, extra virgin olive oil, porcini mushrooms, radicchio, truffles, dried pasta, different varieties of rice, and so on.
Both the revised and the newly added recipes in this book move on the same track, in pursuit not of novelty, but of taste. The taste they have been devised to achieve wants not to astonish, but to reassure. It issues from the cultural memory, the enduring world of generations of Italian cooks, each generation setting a place at table where the next one will feel at ease and at home. It is a pattern of cooking that can accommodate improvisation and fresh intuitions each time it is taken in hand, as long as it continues to be a pattern we can recognize, as long as its evolving forms comfort us with that essential attribute of the civilized life, familiarity.
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is meant to be used as a kitchen handbook, the basic manual for cooks of every level, from beginners to highly accomplished ones, who want an accessible and comprehensive guide to the products, the techniques, and the dishes that constitute