Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [306]
In an Italian meal, there is no main course. With some rare exceptions—such as ossobuco e risotto, which is served as one dish, in the Milanese style—a single dominant course goes against eating in the Italian way, which consists of working one’s way through an interesting and balanced succession of small courses. Of these, two are principal courses that are never served side by side.
The first course may be pasta served either sauced or in broth, or it can be a risotto, or a soup. The Italian word for soup, minestra, is also the word often used in naming the first course, because even if it is a sauced pasta or risotto, it is served in a soup dish and, like any soup, always precedes and never accompanies the meat, fowl, or fish course.
When there has been time to relish and consume the first course, to salute its passing with some wine and to regroup the taste buds, the second course comes to the table. If one is ordering in a restaurant, a restaurant that caters to Italians, not to tourists, the choice of a second course is made after one has had the first course. This doesn’t mean that one has made no plans, but that one waits to confirm them to make sure that one’s original intentions and present inclinations coincide.
At home, of course, the entire meal will have been planned in advance by whoever makes such decisions. Here, the second course is usually a development of the theme established by the first. The reverse may also be true, when the first course is chosen in relation to the second. If the second course is going to be beef braised in wine, you will not preface it with spaghetti in clam sauce or with a dish of lasagne thickly laced with meat. You might prefer a risotto with asparagus, with zucchini, or plain, with Parmesan cheese. Or a dish of green gnocchi. Or a light potato soup.
If you are going to start with tagliatelle alla bolognese, homemade noodles with meat sauce, you might want to give your palate some relief by following it with a simple roast of veal or chicken. On the other hand, you would not choose a second course so bland, such as poached fish, that it could not sustain the impact of the first.
An Italian meal is a lively sequence of sensations, alternating the crisp with the soft and yielding, the pungent with the bland, the variable with the staple, the elaborate with the simple. It may take for its theme “fish,” and announce it very gently with a simple antipasto of tiny, boiled shrimp, delicately seasoned with olive oil, parsley, and lemon juice, and served still warm. Subsequently, a squid and clam risotto can make peppery comments on the theme, which might then be resoundingly proclaimed by a magnificent turbot baked with potatoes and garlic. All will subside in a brisk, slightly bitter salad of radicchio and field greens, to close on the sweet, liquid note of fresh sliced fruit in wine.
The second course is often accompanied by one or two vegetable side dishes, which sometimes develop into an independent course of their own. The pleasures of the Italian table are never keener than when the vegetables come on the scene. The word for a vegetable dish is contorno, whose literal translation is “contour.” It’s a good description of the role vegetables play because it is the choice of vegetables that defines an Italian meal, that gives it shape, that circles it with the flavors, texture, and colors of the season.
In planning an Italian menu, choosing the vegetables is often the most critical decision you will have to make. It will probably determine what kind of a pasta sauce or risotto you are going to make, which in turn affects plans for the second course, the vegetable contorno, and the all-important salad. It’s not a choice you should make abstractly, if you can help it. The most successful Italian menu plan is one that takes shape in the market, when you come face to face with your materials.
Salad is always served after the second course and its contorno are cleared away. It is the meal’s next to last act,