Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [3]
On the eastern side of the same Apennines that hug the Riviera coast lies the richest gastronomic region in Italy, Emilia-Romagna. Its capital, Bologna, is probably the only city in Italy whose name is instantly associated in the Italian mind not with monuments, not with artists, not with a heroic past, but with food.
Emilia-Romagna is almost evenly divided between mountainous land and flat, with the Apennines at its back and at its feet the southeastern corner of the great northern plain rolling out to meet the Adriatic. The Emilian plain is extraordinarily fertile land enriched by the alluvial deposits of the countless Apennine torrents that have coursed through it toward the sea. It leads all Italy in the production of wheat, the same wheat with which Bologna’s celebrated handmade pasta is produced. Italy’s greatest cow’s milk cheese, parmigiano-reggiano, is made here, taking its name from two Emilian cities, Parma and Reggio. The whey left over from cheesemaking is fed to hogs who, in turn, provide the hams for Parma prosciutto and meat for the finest pork products in the world.
Northern Italy stops at the southern border of Emilia-Romagna and, with Tuscany, Central Italy begins. From Tuscany down, the Apennines and their foothills in their southward march spread nearly from coast to coast, so that this part of Italy is prevalently mountainous. Two major changes take place in cooking. First, as it is simpler on a hillside to plant a grove of olive trees than to raise a herd of cows, olive oil supplants butter as the dominant cooking fat. Second, as we get farther away from Emilia-Romagna’s fields, its homemade pasta of soft-wheat flour and eggs is replaced by the factory-made, hard-wheat and eggless macaroni of the south.
However much we roam, we shall not be able to say we have tracked down the origin of Italy’s greatest cooking. It is not in the north, or the center, or the south, or the Islands. It is not in Bologna or Florence, in Venice or Genoa, in Rome or Naples or Palermo. It is in all of those places, because it is everywhere.
It is not the created, not to speak of “creative,” cooking of restaurant chefs. It is the cooking that spans remembered history, that has evolved during the whole course of transmitted skills and intuitions in homes throughout the Italian peninsula and the islands, in its hamlets, on its farms, in its great cities. It is cooking from the home kitchen. Of course there have been—and there still are—aristocrats’ homes, merchants’ homes, peasants’ homes, but however disparate the amenities, they have one vital thing in common: Food, whether simple or elaborate, is cooked in the style of the family. There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine because there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking. All roads lead to the home, to la cucina di casa—the only one that deserves to be called Italian cooking.
FUNDAMENTALS
Where Flavor Starts
FLAVOR, IN ITALIAN DISHES, builds up from the bottom. It is not a cover, it is a base. In a pasta sauce, a risotto, a soup, a fricassee, a stew, or a dish of vegetables, a foundation of flavor supports, lifts, points up the principal ingredients. To grasp this architectural principle central to the structure of much Italian cooking, and to become familiar with the three key techniques that enable you to apply it, is to take a long step toward mastering Italian taste. The techniques are known as battuto, soffritto, and insaporire.
BATTUTO
The name comes from the verb battere, which means “to strike,” and it describes the cut-up mixture of ingredients produced by “striking” them on a cutting board with a chopping knife. At one