THE COOKBOOK TEST #0055: THE CLASSIC ITALIAN COOK BOOK
INSTALLMENT #0055 (PAID) A MASTERFUL BEGINNING / A SENSE OF PLACE / PASTA MADE BY HAND / A BOWL OF THREE COLORS
Dear Subscribers,
This week's Italian cookbook resembles last week's Italian cookbook in much the same way that a six-course seafood dinner cooked by a master chef at a Neapolitan villa resembles a raspberry Fruit Roll-up. SWEET BASIL, GARLIC, TOMATOES AND CHIVES by Diana Shaw was a tourist's vague impressions of what it might be like to cook Italian food in an American kitchen. THE CLASSIC ITALIAN COOK BOOK by Marcella Hazan is a masterwork by a confident culinary superstar, grounded so deeply in history, geography, and personal experience that every recipe practically resonates with authority.
I hadn't heard of Hazan before I scooped up this title at a small-town antique shop in Wisconsin, but a little bit of research revealed that she attained (and still retails) Bona Fide Legend status. Food & Wine described her as "exalted" and "hugely influential"; the New Yorker noted that:
Many of history’s female immigrant chefs and cookbook writers were underappreciated in their day, or rose to fame during their lifetimes only to fall out of public memory after their deaths. Hazan, of course, is not one of those chefs. At the height of her career, she became so popular that Bloomingdale’s created a boutique in its storefront on Fifty-ninth Street called Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen, stocking it with her homemade pasta Bolognese and extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany. For her 1997 book, “Marcella Cucina,” HarperCollins gave her a six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance, higher than any that had been reported for an American cookbook at the time.
What grabbed me immediately about Hazan, just reading the introduction to her book, was how tuned in she was to the nature of Italy itself. This is to say that the nation even today is something of a fictional, highly fragmented hodgepodge of an entity. She opens her book by writing:
The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn't exist. "Italian cooking" is an expression of convenience rarely used by Italians. The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and usually hostile states. They submitted to different rulers, they were protected by sovereign armies and navies, and they developed their own cultural traditions and, of course, their own special and distinct approaches to food.
Hazan goes on to cite a number of distinct examples, looking at former regions and city states that exist within an hour's drive of each other yet have utterly distinct approaches to an entire pantheon of recipes. (Another book to look at if you enjoy this sort of thing is the 65-pound boulder of a tome called THE SILVER SPOON, a book I'm not sure I can write about because it contains several encyclopedias' worth of information.)
The author's intelligence, knowledge, justifiable confidence, curiosity, and disciplined writing makes this book a joy to read; presumably a joy to cook from, as well. Let's dive into it.
at your service,
James
THE CLASSIC ITALIAN COOK BOOK
BY MARCELLA HAZAN
ALFRED A. KNOPF | 1973
No matter what kind of cookbook I'm reading, I respond well to a lot of references to specific places. Countries, regions, cities, neighborhoods, individual people's homes - tell us about a place, and you can tell us about foodways, tradition, and hospitality.
Specificity is The Classic Italian Cook Book's main jam. Here's an introduction for a recipe for Calamari Fritti:
One of the most prized delicacies along the Adriatic is very tiny squid, often no more than 1 1/2 inches long, fried whole in hot oil. They are incredibly tender and sweet, and, should you find yourself on the Adriatic coast, do not miss your chance to eat them. Although not quite so tender and delicate, our larger local squid can be very good indeed when fried, but it must first be cut up into rings.
PASTA MADE BY HAND
Every once in a long while, real life comes for me with a vengeance and my best-laid plans are thrown to the winds. I had one evening this week when I could make hand-made pasta out of The Classic Italian Cook Book for my family, and, naturally, I came down with some horrible and exhausting cold/flu kind of thing. I was able to pry myself out of bed.
I was able to make and roll out the dough. But I was not able to take it the additional few steps of rolling it pasta-thin by hand, as I'd planned - halfway through the process, I was ready to fall over. So, like a chump, I ran it through my KitchenAid pasta roller.
I got dinner on the table (pasta, sauce, soup) and made it back upstairs to collapse again for another 24 hours.
Here's what I can say: The book's instructions for hand-making pasta are detailed and impeccable, and the bit that I followed (making the dough) turned out great. The pasta was delicious - the kids were jubilant.
Full credit to the book - half credit to me for scrapping myself out of bed and making it down the stairs in order to cook.
A BOWL OF THREE COLORS
If you asked me how and why I pick the recipes to test that I do, I wouldn't really have a good answer for you. It's not based on difficulty - I've attempted easy recipes, and I've attempted hard ones. It's not based on time or money, it's not even based on the theme of the book in question. I guess I'd say that it's based on the kind of hook the recipe sets into me as I turn the pages.
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