Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [150]
4. Put in the squid rings and tentacles, cover the pan leaving the cover slightly askew, and cook at a gentle simmer for about 45 minutes, or until the squid is very tender when prodded with a fork. If the liquid in the pan should become insufficient to continue cooking before the squid is done, add about ½ cup water. Make sure, however, that the water has boiled away before adding the other ingredients.
5. While the squid is cooking, shell the shrimp, remove the dark vein, and wash in cold water. If larger than small to medium size, divide the shrimp in half lengthwise.
6. When the squid is tender, add liberal pinches of salt, several grindings of black pepper or the chopped chili pepper, and the washed clams and mussels in their shells. Turn the heat up to high. Check the mussels and clams frequently, and move them around, bringing to the top the ones from the bottom. The moment the first mussels or clams begin to unclench their shells, add the shrimp and the scallops. Cook until the last clam or mussel has opened up. Transfer the soup to a serving bowl and bring to the table at once, with the grilled or toasted bread on the side.
Squid
FRIED calamari, to use the Italian word by which squid has become popular, appears on the menus of restaurants of nearly every gastronomic persuasion. But frying is merely one of the many delectable uses to which you can put calamari. No other food that comes from the sea is more versatile to work with. It can be baked, braised, grilled, stewed, or made into soup. It can be congenially paired with potatoes and with a great number of other vegetables. When very small, it can be cooked whole, but when larger, its sac can either be sliced into rings or employed as nature’s most perfectly conceived container for stuffing. Only outside Italy, however, is its ink used much. To the Italian palate, the harsh, pungent ink is the least desirable part of the squid. As Venetian cooks have shown, it’s only the mellow, velvety, warm-tasting ink of cuttlefish—seppie—that is suitable for pasta sauce, risotto, and other black dishes.
Cooking times Squid’s most vulnerable quality is its tenderness, which it has when raw, but loses when improperly cooked. To stay tender, squid must be cooked either very briefly, over a strong flame, as when it is fried or grilled, or for a long time—45 minutes or more—over very gentle heat. Any other cooking procedure produces a consistency that closely resembles that of thick rubber bands.
How to clean and prepare for cooking Fishmongers are now doing a competent job of cleaning squid, and if your market offers that service, you should take advantage of it. Nevertheless, it is useful to understand how squid is cleaned because you never know how thorough your fishmonger may have been, and you will particularly want to go over his work when you will be using the sac whole for stuffing. It is possible, moreover, that cleaned squid is not available and you have to do the job yourself.
• Put the squid in a bowl, fill it with cold water, and let soak for a minimum of 30 minutes.
• Take a squid, hold the sac in one hand, and with the other, firmly pull off the tentacles, which will come away with the squid’s pulpy insides to which they are attached.
• Cut the tentacles straight across just above the eyes, and discard everything from the eyes down.
• Squeeze off the small, boney beak at the base of the tentacles.
• If dealing with tentacles from a large squid, try to pull off as much of their skin as you easily can. Wash the tentacles in cold water and pat thoroughly dry with cloth or paper towels.
• Grasp the exposed end of the cellophane-thin, quill-like bone in the sac and pull it away.