Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking Read online

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

  Copyright © 1992 by Marcella Hazan

  Illustrations copyright © 1992 by Karin Kretschmann

  Jacket design by Carol Devine Carson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  This is a fully revised and updated edition of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book, originally published in 1973 by Harper’s Magazine Press, and More Classic Italian Cooking, which were published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1976 and 1978 respectively.

  Copyright © 1973 by Marcella Hazan

  Copyright © 1978 by Marcella Polini Hazan and Victor Hazan

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hazan, Marcella

  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking / by Marcella Hazan. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-95830-3

  1. Cookery, Italian. I. Title.

  TX723.H342 1992

  641.5945—dc20 92-52954

  v3.1

  ALSO BY MARCELLA HAZAN

  The Classic Italian Cook Book

  More Classic Italian Cooking

  Marcella’s Italian Kitchen

  Marcella Cucina

  For my students

  MUCH OF THIS BOOK has been shaped by them. To their questions, I have sought to provide answers. Where they found obscurity, I have tried to bring clarity; what to them seemed difficult, I have tried to make simple. Their experiences and insights have become mine. To those who in the near quarter century that has gone by have followed me into my kitchen, first in my New York apartment, then in Bologna, finally in Venice, this work is dedicated, with affection and gratitude.

  Contents

  Preface

  Introduction

  Fundamentals

  Appetizers

  Soups

  Pasta

  Risotto

  Gnocchi

  Crespelle

  Polenta

  Frittate

  Fish and Shellfish

  Chicken, Squab, Duck, and Rabbit

  Veal

  Beef

  Lamb

  Pork

  Variety Meats

  Vegetables

  Salads

  Desserts

  Focaccia, Pizza, Bread, and Other Special Doughs

  At Table

  Index

  Preface

  THOSE who are acquainted with The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking may well wonder what those recipes are doing here, between a single pair of covers. I, for one, never imagined that some day my first two books would be reincarnated as one. But then, who could have expected them to journey as far as they have, becoming for so many people, in so many countries of the English-speaking world, a familiar reference to Italian cooking?

  As volumes one and two, to use our working names for them, continued to go into new printings, my American editor, Judith Jones, and I thought it opportune to look them over and freshen them up, removing some recommendations that were no longer applicable, and where necessary, bringing recipes abreast of the many new ingredients available, and of the changes that had taken place in people’s eating habits. It didn’t appear to be much of an undertaking, just a little bit of housecleaning, but here we are three years later, with nearly every recipe completely rewritten, and many so substantially revised that they could well be considered new.

  In the twenty years since The Classic Italian Cook Book was written, and in the fourteen since the publication of More Classic Italian Cooking, I have continued to cook from both books for my classes, for my husband, and for our friends. Perhaps without my always being fully conscious of it, the dishes continued to evolve, moving always toward a simpler, clearer expression of their primary flavors, and toward a steadily diminishing dependence on cooking fat. When I began systematically to go over each recipe for this book, I found myself rewriting each one to focus more sharply on what made the dish work, sometimes just to make one or two steps in the procedure more comprehensible, but often discovering that the recipe had to be wholly reshaped to make room for the perceptions and experiences gained in the intervening years of cooking and teaching.

  In reviewing my work, I looked out for those recipes whose place in a book dedicated to classic principles of Italian cooking no longer seemed wholly earned, or whose successful execution depended on imponderables that no set of instructions could adequately convey. The few that fell into either category, I deleted. On the other hand, there were more than four dozen unpublished recipes that were the best of those I had come across and cooked with in recent years, a savory hoard that cried out to be included here. You will find them spread throughout the book, among the appetizers, soups, pastas, risotti, all the way to the desserts.

  I have applied myself with all the diligence I could muster to reworking the section on yeast doughs, where you now have improved doughs for bread, new doughs for focaccia and pizza, and as an entirely fresh entry, one of the greatest of Italian regional loaves, Apulia’s olive bread.

  The microwave oven has become such a ubiquitous appliance that I had dearly hoped to incorporate here suggestions for its use but, I regret, those who like to cook by this method will have to look elsewhere. I have tried again and again, but the microwave does not produce for me the satisfying textures, the vigorous, well-integrated flavors that I look for in Italian cooking. This is aside from the fact that the oven’s principal advantage, that of speed, declines precipitously when cooking for more than one. I believe with my whole heart in the act of cooking, in its smells, in its sounds, in its observable progress on the fire. The microwave separates the cook from cooking, cutting off the emotional and physical pleasure deeply rooted in the act, and not even with its swiftest and neatest performance can the push-button wizardry of the device compensate for such a loss.

  Early on, when the full scope of the task of revision began to be visible, it became clear that the sensible approach was to pull the contents of The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking together into a single broad-ranging volume. Having done so, the advantage became most apparent in the new pasta section: The chapters from the two earlier books have been consolidated and expanded to form one of the fullest and most detailed collections of recipes for pasta sauces and pasta dishes in print. It is preceded now by a completely reformulated introduction to homemade pasta that I hope will lead more cooks to discover how easily and quickly they can make homemade pasta in the classic Bolognese style, and how much better it is than any fresh pasta they can buy. Equally extensive are the sections on soups, risotto, fish, and vegetables, far more complete and more informative than in either of the two preceding books.

  There is an entirely new chapter called Fundamentals, a mini-encyclopedia of Italian food. It is densely packed with information about cooking techniques and the herbs and cheeses used in an Italian kitchen, it has the recipes for several very useful basic sauces, and it tells how to choose and use such ingredients as balsamic vinegar, bottarga, extra virgin olive oil, porcini mushrooms, radicchio, truffles, dried pasta, different varieties of rice, and so on.

  Both the revised and the newly added recipes in this book move on the same track, in pursuit not of novelty, but of taste. The taste they have been devised to achieve wants not to astonish, but to reassure. It issues from the cultural memory, the enduring wor
ld of generations of Italian cooks, each generation setting a place at table where the next one will feel at ease and at home. It is a pattern of cooking that can accommodate improvisation and fresh intuitions each time it is taken in hand, as long as it continues to be a pattern we can recognize, as long as its evolving forms comfort us with that essential attribute of the civilized life, familiarity.

  Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is meant to be used as a kitchen handbook, the basic manual for cooks of every level, from beginners to highly accomplished ones, who want an accessible and comprehensive guide to the products, the techniques, and the dishes that constitute timeless Italian cooking.

  Marcella Hazan

  Venice, November 1991

  INTRODUCTION

  Understanding Italian Cooking

  ASK AN ITALIAN about Italian cooking and, depending on whom you approach, you will be told about Bolognese, Venetian, Roman, Milanese cooking or Tuscan, Piedmontese, Sicilian, Neapolitan. But Italian cooking? It would seem no single cuisine answers to that name. The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of regions that long antedate the Italian nation, regions that until 1861 were part of sovereign and usually hostile states, sharing few cultural traditions and no common spoken language—it was not until after World War II that Italian began to be the everyday language of a substantial part of the population—and practicing entirely distinct styles of cooking.

  Take, for example, the cuisines of Venice and Naples, two cultures in whose culinary history seafood has had such a major role. Just as Venetians and Neapolitans cannot speak to each other in their native idiom and be understood, there is not a single dish from the light-handed, understated Venetian repertory that would be recognizable on a Neapolitan table, nor any of Naples’s vibrant, ebulliently savory specialties that do not seem exotic in Venice.

  Four hundred and fifty miles separate Venice and Naples but there are unbridgeable differences between Bologna and Florence, which are only sixty miles apart. In crossing the border between the two regional capitals, every aspect of cooking style seems to have turned over and, like an embossed coin, landed on its reverse side. Out of the abundance of the Bolognese kitchen comes cooking that is exuberant, prodigal with costly ingredients, wholly baroque in its restless exploration of every agreeable contrast of texture and flavor. On the other hand, the canny Florentine cook takes careful measure of all things and produces food that plays austere harmonies on unadorned, essential themes.

  Bologna will stuff veal with succulent Parma ham, coat it with aged Parmesan, sauté it in butter, and conceal it all under an extravagant blanket of shaved white truffles. Florence takes a T-bone steak of noble size, grills it quickly over the incandescent embers of a wood fire, adding nothing but the aroma of olive oil and a grinding of pepper. Both can be triumphs.

  The contrasts of Italian food’s regional character are further sharpened by two dominant aspects of the landscape—the mountains and the sea.

  Italy is a peninsula shaped like a full-length boot that has stepped up to the thigh into the Mediterranean and Adriatic seas. There it is fastened to the rest of Europe by an uninterrupted chain of the continent’s tallest mountains, the Alps. At the base of the Alps lies Italy’s only major plain, which spreads from Venice on the Adriatic coast westward through Lombardy and into Piedmont. This is the dairy zone of Italy, where the cooking fat is butter and the staple cereals are rice for risotto and cornmeal for polenta. It was only when the industries of the north began to attract labor from the south that spaghetti and other factory-made pasta appeared on the tables of Milan and Turin.

  The plain ends its westward trek just before reaching the Mediterranean shore, cut off by the foothills of Italy’s other great mountain chain, the Apennines. This chain stretches from north to south for the whole length of the country like the massive, protruding spine of some immense beast. On the eastern and western flanks, gently rounded hills slope toward the seas that surround the country. At the center, the land rises to form inhospitable stone peaks. Huddled between peaks and slopes are countless valleys, isolated from each other until they were connected by modern roads, giving birth, like so many Shangri-las, to wholly separate people, cultures, and cuisines.

  Climatic zones, astonishing in their numbers and diversity for a country relatively small, have added their contributions to the variety of Italian food. Turin, capital of Piedmont, standing in the open plain at the foot of the windswept Alps, has winters more severe than Copenhagen, and one of the most robust cuisines of the nation. The coast just ninety miles to the west, sheltered by the Apennines’ protecting slopes and bathed by soft Mediterranean breezes, enjoys the gentle weather synonymous with the Riviera. Here flowers thrive, olive groves flourish, fragrant herbs come up in every meadow and abound in every dish. It is no accident that this is the birthplace of pesto.

  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 mast
ering 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 time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsley, and onion, all chopped very fine. Garlic, celery, or carrot might be included, depending on the dish. The principal change that contemporary usage has brought is the substitution of olive oil or butter for lard, although many country cooks still depend on the richer flavor of the latter. However formulated, a battuto is at the base of virtually every pasta sauce, risotto or soup, and of numberless meat and vegetable dishes.

  SOFFRITTO

  When a battuto is sautéed in a pot or skillet until the onion becomes translucent and the garlic, if any, becomes colored a pale gold, it turns into a soffritto. This step precedes the addition of the main ingredients, whatever they may be. Although many cooks make a soffritto by sautéing all the components of the battuto at one time, it makes for more careful cooking to keep the onion and the garlic separate. The onion is sautéed first, when it becomes translucent the garlic is added, and when the garlic becomes colored, the rest of the battuto. The reasons are two: one, if you start by sautéing the onion, you are creating a richer base of flavor in which to sauté the battuto; two, because onion takes longer to sauté than garlic, if you were to put both in at the same time, by the time the onion became translucent the garlic would be too dark. If, however, your battuto recipe calls for pancetta, cook the onion and pancetta together to make use of the pancetta’s fat, thus reducing the need for other shortening.

  An imperfectly executed soffritto will impair the flavor of a dish no matter how carefully all the succeeding steps are carried out. If the onion is merely stewed or incompletely sautéed, the taste of the sauce, or the risotto, or the vegetable never takes off and will remain feeble. If the garlic is allowed to become dark, its pungency will dominate all other flavors.