Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking - Marcella Hazan [7]
BEANS
Fagioli
Legumes are used liberally throughout Italy, but they are nowhere treated with the affection they receive in the central regions of Tuscany, Abruzzi, Umbria, and Latium. Tuscans favor cannellini, or white kidney beans. Chick peas and fava beans triumph in Abruzzi and Latium. Umbria is celebrated for its lentils. In the north there is a pocket of bean adoration that rivals that of the center and it is in the Venetian northeast corner of the country, where perhaps the finest version of the classic bean soup—pasta e fagioli—is produced. The beans Venetians use are marbled pink and white versions of the cranberry or Scotch bean of which the most highly prized is the lamon, beautifully speckled when raw, dark red when cooked.
Some beans are available fresh for only a short time of the year and, outside Italy, some are rarely seen in their fresh-in-the-pod state. In their place you can use either canned or dried beans. The dried are much to be preferred, and not only because they are so much more economical than the canned. When properly cooked, dried beans have flavor and consistency that the bland, pulpy canned variety cannot match.
Cooking dried beans The instructions that follow are valid for all dried legumes that need to be precooked, such as white cannellini beans, Great Northern beans, red and white kidney beans, cranberry beans, chick peas, and fava beans. Lentils do not need to be precooked.
• Put the quantity of beans required by the recipe in a bowl and add enough water to cover by at least 3 inches. Put the bowl in some out-of-the-way corner of your kitchen and leave it there overnight.
• When the beans have finished soaking, drain them, rinse them in fresh cold water, and put them in a pot that will accommodate the beans and enough water to cover them by at least 3 inches. Put a lid on the pot and turn on the heat to medium. When the water comes to a boil, adjust the heat so that it simmers steadily, but gently. Cook the beans until tender, but not mushy, about 45 minutes to 1 hour. Add salt only when the beans are almost completely tender so that their skin does not dry and crack while cooking. Taste them periodically so you’ll know when they are done. Keep the beans in the liquid that you cooked them in until you are ready to use them. If necessary, they can be prepared a day or two ahead of time and stored, always in their liquid.
BOTTARGA
This is the roe of the female thin-lipped gray mullet, which has been extracted with its membrane intact, salted, lightly pressed, washed, and dried in the sun. It has the shape of a long, flattened tear drop, usually varying in length between 4 and 7 inches, is of a dark, amber gold color, and usually comes in pairs. In the past it was always encased in wax but now it is more frequently vacuum-sealed in clear plastic. The finest bottarga comes from the mullet—muggine in Italian—taken from the brackish waters of Cabras, a lake off the western shore of Sardinia.
The flavor of good bottarga is delicately spicy and briny, very pleasantly stimulating on the palate. After peeling off its membrane, it can be sliced paper thin and added to green salads, or to boiled cannellini, or served as an appetizer on thin, toasted rounds of buttered bread with a slice of cucumber. It is delicious grated and tossed with pasta. Bottarga is never cooked.
Another kind of bottarga is that made from tuna roe; it is very much larger, a dark reddish brown in color, and shaped like a long brick. It is drier, sharper, more coarsely emphatic in flavor than mullet bottarga, for which it is a much cheaper, but not desirable substitute. Tuna bottarga is quite common throughout the countries on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
BREAD CRUMBS
Pan Grattato
The bread crumbs used in Italian cooking are made from good stale bread with the addition of no flavoring of any kind whatever. They must be very dry, or they will become gummy, particularly