Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [240]
2. When you have drained the leaves for the last time, shake off all the water, either using a salad spinner or gathering them in a cloth towel and snapping it sharply 3 or 4 times.
3. Tear or cut each leaf into 2 or 3 pieces, depending on its size, and set them aside.
4. Put the oil, onion, and pancetta in a saute pan, turn the heat on to medium, and cook the onion, stirring from time to time, until it becomes colored a deep gold.
5. Put in as many of the lettuce pieces as will not overfill the pan. If the lettuce doesn’t all fit at first, you can add the rest when the first batch has cooked briefly and diminished in bulk. Add salt, cover the pan, and cook until the central rib of the leaves just reaches tenderness, about 30 to 40 minutes. Turn the lettuce over from time to time as it cooks. When it is done, if the juices in the pan are watery, remove the cover, raise the heat to high, and boil them away quickly. Serve promptly. Do not reheat or refrigerate.
MUSHROOMS
Nearly all the fresh mushrooms available for cooking today are cultivated. The wild boletus edulis—Italy’s highly prized porcini—has the richest flavor of any mushroom, but it is rarely found fresh in markets outside Italy and France. It is, however, widely distributed in dried form, and when properly reconstituted, its intense fragrance adds a powerful fillip to the flavor of sauces, of some soups and meats, and of dishes with fresh, cultivated mushrooms. Among the cultivated varieties available fresh, the following are the most useful in Italian cooking:
White mushrooms It is, by an overwhelming margin, the most common market mushroom. In Italy it goes either by the French name champignon, or its Italian equivalent, prataiolo, both words meaning “of the field.” It is claimed that size does not affect taste, but I find the texture of the small, young mushroom called “button” to be distinctly superior to that of the more mature, larger examples.
Cremini This light- to dark-brown mushroom was the one cultivated variety available long before the white mushroom was developed. It has more depth of flavor than the white, but it is also more expensive. If cost is not a consideration, it can be used with success in any recipe that calls for white button mushrooms.
Shiitake The stems of this brown Japanese variety are too tough to use, but the caps give marvelous results when cooked by the method applied in Italy to fresh porcini.
How to buy and store Look for firmness as an indication of freshness, and avoid flabbiness, which is a signal of staleness. When buying white button or cremini mushrooms, choose those with smooth, closed caps, whereas the caps of shiitake are always open. Do not store mushrooms in plastic, which accelerates their absorption of moisture and deterioration, but in paper bags. If very fresh, they will stay in good condition in a refrigerator or a in a cold room in winter for 2 or 3 days.
Sautéed Mushrooms with Olive Oil, Garlic, and Parsley: Two Methods
THE CLASSIC flavor base for mushrooms in Italy is olive oil, garlic, and parsley. When mushrooms, or other vegetables, are sliced thin and cooked on such a base, they are known as trifolati, prepared in the manner of truffles.
The two methods that follow here both rest on the same traditional foundation of flavor, but differ in their objectives and results. The first has a more conservative approach, aiming at preserving firmness and texture. The second version is more radical, mixing white mushrooms with dried porcini, and cooking them slowly, as one would fresh wild boletus, bestowing on standard market mushrooms the musky aroma and the silky softness of porcini.
Method 1
For 6 servings
1½ pounds fresh, firm, white button OR cremini mushrooms
1½ teaspoons garlic chopped very fine
½ cup extra virgin olive oil
Salt
Black pepper, ground fresh from the mill
3 tablespoons parsley chopped very fine
1. Slice off and discard a thin disk from the butt end of the mushrooms’ stem without detaching the stem from the cap. Wash