Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [307]
A baked dessert is rarely served at home after a meal of two or more courses. The traditional and sensible preference is for a bowl of fruit, sometimes substituted by marinated fruit slices.
It is not expected that every Italian meal one takes or makes will be full scale. Nor should we feel guilty when all we have the time or capacity to handle is pasta, or even just a seafood salad. But we ought not to be quite ready yet to dismiss the established practices of Italians at table.
In the relationships of its parts, the pattern of a complete Italian meal is very like that of a civilized life. No dish overwhelms another, either in quantity or in flavor, each leaves room for new appeals to the eye and palate, each fresh sensation of taste, color, and texture interlaces a lingering recollection of the last. To make time to eat as Italians still do is to share in their inexhaustible gift of making art out of life.
Composing an Italian Menu: Principles and Examples
WHEN DEVISING A MENU, we can chart the basic guidelines we need to follow by drawing on plain good sense. Courses served side by side ought not to have sauces whose flavors and consistencies are repetitive or at odds with each other: If the second course is a fricassee or a stew with a tomato base, obviously tomato should not be a large presence in the accompanying vegetable course, or vice versa; if one is boldly flavored with garlic and olive oil, we’ll think twice before matching it with a subtle dish whose base might be cream or butter. Nor are we likely to enjoy a sequence of courses that are equally runny, or dense, or starchy, or spicy, or that are strongly accented with the same herb, unless we are deliberately restating and developing a theme.
If the flavors and aromas of one course are exuberant, we shan’t want to follow it with one whose gentle, soft-spoken approach would, by comparison, become imperceptible. Whenever two or more courses precede the salad or dessert, their progress must move upward, climbing toward more prominent sensations of weight, of richness, of pungency if any, of palate-gripping flavor. It is the same principle people follow when serving more than one wine.
From the practical point of view of organizing time, space, and equipment to pull together the components of a meal, clearly we must avoid an assemblage of dishes whose preparation can become mutually obstructive, nor can we fail to take into account the last-minute attention each may require to reach the table at its peak of flavor.
Once the general and commonsensical principles of menu planning become apparent, the choices remaining before us provide an infinite number of agreeable and workable combinations. A representative selection that encompasses different occasions for an Italian meal is illustrated by the specimen menus that follow, of which all but a few are based on the classic Italian sequence of courses. I am aware that, judged by contemporary usage, some of them will appear to be rather densely packed. Actually, if you keep the portions small, you might find that a full-scale Italian meal is a less stultifying, more interesting event at table than one based on a sufficiently filling single course. If you feel you absolutely must simplify, you can always drop either the first or the second course. Moreover, even when you cannot reproduce the menus in full, you should find their examples a helpful guide to choosing dishes that go well together.
The role of bread One of the Italian words for a meal is companatico—that which you eat with bread. At an Italian table, food and bread are inseparable. In Italy, you will notice people begin to nibble on bread the moment they sit down to eat, just bread alone, without butter. No bread is eaten with pasta, but it will be used to wipe the dish clean of any sauce that might be left over. Morsels of bread punctuate the consumption of the second course, sop up the juices of a stew, or of a vegetable