Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

by Marcella Hazan

  Note A battuto usually, but not invariably, becomes a soffritto. Occasionally, you combine it with the other ingredients of the dish as is, in its raw state, a crudo, to use the Italian phrase. This is a practice one resorts to in order to produce less emphatic flavor, such as, for example, in making a roast of lamb in which the meat cooks along with the battuto a crudo from the start. Another example is pesto, a true battuto a crudo, although, perhaps because it has traditionally been pounded with a pestle rather than chopped with a blade, it is not always recognized as such. Yet there are many Italian cooks who, in referring to any battuto, might say they are making a pestino, a “little pesto.”

  INSAPORIRE

  The step that follows a soffritto is called insaporire, “bestowing taste.” It usually applies to vegetables, inasmuch as, in Italian cooking, vegetables are the critical ingredient in most first courses—pastas, soups, risotti—and in many fricassees and stews, and often constitute an important course on their own. But the step may also apply to the ground meat that is going to be turned into a meat sauce or meat loaf, or to rice, when it is toasted in the soffritto as a preliminary to making risotto. As you become aware of it, you will spot it in countless recipes.

  The technique of insaporire requires that you add the vegetables or other principal ingredients to the soffritto base and, over very lively heat, briskly sauté them until they have become completely coated with the flavor elements of the base, particularly the chopped onion. One can often trace the unsatisfying taste, the lameness of dishes purporting to be Italian in style, to the reluctance of some cooks to execute this step thoroughly, to their failure to give it enough time over sufficient heat, or even to their skipping it altogether.

  SAUTÉING WITH BUTTER AND OIL

  A soffritto is sometimes executed with olive oil as the only fat, but on those occasions when one might find the flavor of olive oil intrusive Italian cooks use butter together with neutral-tasting vegetable oil. Combining the two enables one to sauté at a higher temperature without scorching the butter or having to clarify it.

  The Components

  ANCHOVIES

  Acciughe

  Of all the ingredients used in Italian cooking, none produces headier flavor than anchovies. It is an exceptionally adaptable flavor that accommodates itself to any role one wishes to assign it. Chopped anchovy dissolving into the cooking juices of a roast divests itself of its explicit identity while it contributes to the meat’s depth of taste. When brought to the foreground, as in a sauce for pasta or with melted mozzarella, anchovy’s stirring call takes absolute command of our taste buds. Anchovies are indispensable to bagna caôda, the Piedmontese dip for raw vegetables, and to various forms of salsa verde, the piquant green sauces served with boiled meats or fish.

  What anchovies to get and how to prepare them The meatier anchovies are, the richer and rounder is their flavor. The meatiest anchovies are the ones kept under salt in large tins and sold individually, by weight. One-quarter pound is, for most purposes, an ample quantity to buy at one time. Prepare the fillets as follows:

  • Rinse the whole anchovies under cold running water to remove as much as possible of the salt used to preserve them.

  • Take one anchovy at a time, grasping it by the tail and, with the other hand, use a knife gently to scrape off all its skin. After skinning it, remove the dorsal fin along with the tiny bones attached to it.

  • Push your thumbnail into the open end of the anchovy opposite the tail and run it against the bone, opening the anchovy flat all the way to the tail. With your hand, loosen and lift away the spine, and separate the fish into two boneless fillets. Brush your fingertips over both sides of the fillets to detect and remove any remaining bits of bone.

  • Rinse under cold running water, then pat thoroughly dry with paper towels. Place the fillets in a shallow dish. When one layer of fillets covers the bottom of the dish, pour over it enough extra virgin olive oil to cover. As you add fillets to the dish, pour olive oil over each layer. Make sure the top layer is fully covered by oil.

  • If you are not going to use them within 2 or 3 hours, cover the dish and refrigerate. If the dish lacks a lid of its own use plastic wrap. The anchovies will keep for 10 days to 2 weeks, but they taste best when consumed during the first week. Prepared in this manner, the fillets are powerfully good as an appetizer or even a snack, when spread on a thickly buttered slice of crusty bread.

  Note If you cannot find the salted whole anchovies described above and must buy prepared fillets, look for those packed in glass so you can choose the meatier ones. Do not be tempted by bargain-priced anchovies because the really good ones are never cheap, and the cheap ones are likely to be the really awful—mealy, salt-drenched—stuff that has given anchovies an undeserved bad name.

  If you happen to be using canned anchovies, don’t keep the leftover ones in the tin. Remove them, curl them into rolls, put them in a small jar or deep saucer, cover them with extra virgin olive oil, and refrigerate.

  Do not use anchovy paste from a tube, if you can help it. It is harsh and salty and has very little of the warm, attractive aroma that constitutes the principal reason for using anchovies.

  Cooking with anchovies On most occasions, anchovies are chopped fine so that they can more easily dissolve and merge their flavor with that of the other ingredients. Never put chopped anchovies into very hot oil because they will fry and harden instead of dissolving, and their flavor may turn bitter. Remove the pan from heat when adding the anchovies, putting it back on the burner only when, through stirring, the anchovies have begun to break down into a paste. If you can arrange to have another pot nearby with water boiling, place the pan with the anchovies over it, double-boiler fashion, and stir the anchovies until they dissolve.

  BALSAMIC VINEGAR

  Aceto Balsamico

  Balsamic vinegar, a centuries-old specialty produced in the province of Modena, just north of Bologna, is made entirely from the boiled-down must—the concentrated, sweet juice—of white grapes. True balsamic vinegar is aged for decades in a succession of barrels, each made of a different wood.

  How to judge it The color must be a deep, rich brown, with brilliant flashes of light. When you swirl the vinegar in a wine glass, it must coat the inside of the glass as would a dense, but flowing syrup, neither splotchy nor too thin. Its aroma should be intense, pleasantly penetrating. A sip of it will deliver balanced sweet and sour sensations, neither cloying nor too sharp, on a substantial and velvety body. It is never inexpensive, and it is too precious and rare ever to be put up in a container much larger than a perfume bottle. The label must carry, in full, the officially established appellation, which reads: Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena. All other so-called balsamic vinegars are ordinary commercial wine vinegar flavored with sugar or caramel, bearing no resemblance to the traditional product.

  How to use it True balsamic vinegar is used sparingly. In a salad it never replaces regular vinegar; it is sufficient to add a few drops of it to the basic dressing of olive oil and pure wine vinegar. In cooking, it should be put in at the very end of the process or close to it so that its aroma will carry through into the finished dish. Aceto balsamico is marvelous over cut, fresh strawberries when they are tossed with it just before serving. Regrettably, balsamic vinegar has become a cliché of what is sometimes described as “creative” cooking, in somewhat the same way that tomato and garlic were once clichés of spaghetti-house Italian cooking. It should not be used so often or so indiscriminately that its flavor loses the power to surprise and its emphatic accents become tiresome with repetition.

  BASIL

  Basilico

  The most useful thing one can know about basil is that the less it cooks, the better it is, and that its fragrance is never more seductive than when it is raw. It follows, then, that you will add basil to a pasta sauce only after it is done, when it is being tossed with the pasta. By the same consideration, that most concentrated of basil sauces, pesto, should always be use
d raw, at room temperature, never warmed up. Occasionally, one cooks basil in a soup or stew or other preparation, sacrificing some of the liveliness of its unfettered aroma in order to bond it to that of the other ingredients. If you are in doubt, however, or improvising, put it in at the very last moment, just before serving.

  How to use basil Use only the freshest basil you can. Don’t make do with blackened, drooping leaves. If you grow your own, pick only what you need that day, preferably plucking the leaves early in the morning before they’ve had too much sun. When you are ready to use the basil, rinse it quickly under cold running water or wipe the leaves with a dampened cloth. Unless the recipe calls for thin, julienned strips, it’s best not to take a knife to basil. If you do not want to put the whole leaves in your dish, tear them into smaller pieces with your hands, rather than cutting them. Do not ever use dried or powdered basil. Many people freeze or preserve basil. I’d rather use it fresh and, if it isn’t available, wait until its season returns.

  BAY LEAVES

  Alloro

  Bay may be the most versatile herb in the Italian kitchen. It is used in pasta sauces, it aromatizes such different preserved foods as goat cheese in olive oil or sun-dried figs, it finds its way into most marinades for meat, it is the ideal herb for the barbecue: on a fish skewer, or over calf’s liver, or even in the fire itself. There is no more agreeable match than bay leaves with pears cooked in red wine or with boiled chestnuts.

  What to get Bay leaves dry beautifully and keep indefinitely. Buy only the whole leaves, not the crumbled or powdered, and keep them in a tightly closed glass jar in a cool cupboard. Before using, whether the leaves are dried or fresh, wipe each leaf lightly with a damp cloth.

  Note If you have a garden or terrace or balcony, bay is a hardy perennial that grows quickly into a handsome plant with a nearly inexhaustible supply of leaves for the kitchen. If your winters are bitter and long, bring the bay indoors until spring.

  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 in those dishes where they are tossed with pasta. Once the bread has been ground into fine crumbs, dry the crumbs either by spreading them on a cookie sheet and baking them in a 375° oven for 15 minutes, or toasting them briefly in a cast-iron skillet.

  BROTH

  Brodo

  The broth used by Italian cooks for risotto, for soups, and for braising meat and vegetables is a liquid to which meat, bones, and vegetables have given their flavor, but it is not a strong, dense reduction of those flavors. It is not stock, as the term is used in French cooking. It is light bodied and soft spoken, helping the dishes of which it is a part to taste better without calling attention to itself.

  Italian broth is made principally with meat, together with some bones to give it a bit of substance. When I make broth I always try to have some marrow bones in the pot. The marrow itself makes a delicious appetizer later on grilled or toasted bread, seasoned with Horseradish Sauce.

  The finest broth is that produced by a full-scale Bollito Misto. You may be reluctant, however, to undertake making bollito misto every time you need to replenish your supply of broth. If you are an active cook, you can collect and freeze meat for broth from the boning and preparation of different cuts of veal, beef, and chicken, stealing here and there a juicy morsel from a piece of meat before it is minced for a stuffing or for a meat sauce, or before it goes into a beef or a veal stew. Do not use lamb or pork, the flavor of which is too strong for broth. Use chicken giblets and carcasses most sparingly because their flavor can be disagreeably obtrusive. When ready to make broth, enrich the assortment with a substantial fresh piece of beef brisket or chuck.

  Basic Homemade Meat Broth

  1½ to 2 quarts

  Salt

  1 carrot, peeled

  1 medium onion, peeled

  1 or 2 stalks celery

  ¼ to ½ red or yellow bell pepper, cored and stripped of its seeds

  1 small potato, peeled

  1 fresh, ripe tomato OR a canned Italian plum tomato, drained

  5 pounds assorted beef, veal, and chicken (the last optional) of which no more than 2 pounds may be bones

  1. Put all the ingredients in a stockpot, and add enough water to cover by 2 inches. Set the cover askew, turn on the heat to medium, and bring to a boil. As soon as the liquid starts
to boil, slow it down to the gentlest of simmers by lowering the heat.

  2. Skim off the scum that floats to the surface, at first abundantly, then gradually tapering off. Cook for 3 hours, always at a simmer.

  3. Filter the broth through a large wire strainer lined with paper towels, pouring it into a ceramic or plastic bowl. Allow to cool completely, uncovered.

  4. When cool, place in the refrigerator for several hours or overnight until the fat comes to the surface and solidifies. Scoop up and discard the fat.

  5. If you are using the broth within 3 days after making it, return the bowl to the refrigerator. If you expect to keep it any longer than 3 days, freeze it as described in the note below.

  How to keep broth It is safe to keep broth in the refrigerator for a maximum of 3 days after making it, but unless you are certain you will use it that quickly, it is best to freeze it. It’s impossible to overemphasize how convenient it always is to have frozen broth available. The most practical method is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, unmold it as soon as it is solid, and transfer the cubes to airtight plastic bags. Distribute the cubes among several containers, so that when you are going to use the broth you will open only as many bags as you need.

  CAPERS