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By Root 4080 0

is so sweet that one can be careless about quantity. As it ages, and unfortunately, outside of the growing areas, older garlic is what one will find, it dries, losing sweetness and acquiring sharpness, its skin becoming flaky and brittle, its flesh wrinkled and yellow, like the color of old ivory. It is still good to cook with, but you must use it sparingly and cook it to an even paler color than you would the fresh. I have seen chefs split the clove to remove any part of it that may have turned green. I don’t find this necessary, but I do discard the green shoot when it sprouts outside the clove.

Choose a head of garlic by weight and size. The heavier it feels in the hand, the fresher it’s likelier to be, and large heads have bigger cloves that take longer to dry out. Use only whole garlic, do not be tempted by prepared chopped garlic, or garlic-flavored oils, or powdered garlic. All such products are too harsh for Italian cooking.

Keep garlic in its skin until you are ready to use it. Do not chop it long before you need it. Store garlic out of the refrigerator in a crock with a lid fitting loosely enough so air can flow through. There are perforated garlic crocks made that do the job quite well. Braids of garlic can look quite beautiful hanging in a kitchen, but the heads dry out fairly quickly and all you will have left at some point are empty husks.

MARJORAM

Maggiorana

It is the herb most closely associated with the aromatic cooking of Liguria, the Italian Riviera, where it is used in pasta sauces, in savory pies, in stuffed vegetables, and—possibly most triumphantly—in insalata di mare, seafood salad. Its bewitchingly spicy and flowery aroma vanishes almost entirely when marjoram is dried. One should make every possible effort to get it fresh or, failing that, frozen.

MORTADELLA

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but, in the case of mortadella, it has come closer to character assassination. The products that call themselves mortadella or go by the name of the city where it originated, Bologna, have completely obscured the merits of perhaps the finest achievement of the sausage-maker’s art.

The name mortadella may derive from the mortar the Romans used to employ to pound sausage meat into a paste before stuffing it into its casing. Another explanation suggests that the origin of the name can be traced to the myrtle berries—mirto in Italian—that were once used to aromatize the mixture. The lean meat of which mortadella is composed—the shoulder and neck from carefully selected hogs—together with the jowl and other parts of the pig that the traditional formula requires, is, in fact, ground to a creamy consistency before it is studded with half-inch cubes of fine hogback mixed with a blend of spices and condiments that varies from producer to producer, and stuffed into the casing. Every step of the operation is critical in the making of mortadella, but the one that follows after it is cased is probably the one most responsible for the texture and fragrance that characterize a superior product. Mortadella is finished only when it has undergone a special cooking procedure. It is hung in a room where the temperature is kept at 175° to 190° Fahrenheit, and there it is slowly steamed for up to 20 hours.

Mortadella comes in all sizes, from miniatures of one pound to colossi of 200 or more pounds and 15 inches in diameter. The latter, for which a special beef casing must be used, is the most prized because it takes longer to cook and develops subtler, finer flavors. When it is cut open, the fragrance that rises from the glowing peach-pink meat of a choice, large, Bolognese mortadella is possibly the most seductive of any pork product.

Mortadella’s uses In the cooking of Bologna, minced mortadella is used to enrich the flavor of the stuffing of tortellini and of ground meat dishes such as meat loaf. Cut into sticks, it is breaded and fried as part of a fritto misto or a warm antipasto. It is also served thickly sliced as part of an antipasto platter of cold meats. On a Bolognese table, you will often find