Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

by Marcella Hazan

  Capperi

  Capers are the blooms, nipped while they are still tightly clenched buds, of a plant whose spidery branches hug stone walls and rocky hillsides throughout much of the Mediterranean region. Capers are used abundantly in Sicilian cooking, but no Italian kitchen should be without them. They have their assigned place in many classic preparations, in sauces for pasta, meat, fish, in stuffings, and their sprightly, pungent, yet not harsh flavor makes them one of those condiments that readily support the improvisational, casual style that characterizes much Italian cooking.

  What to look for At one time I had a strong preference for the tiniest capers, the nonpareil variety from Provence. While they are certainly desirable, I’d now rather work with the larger capers from the islands off Sicily and the even larger ones from Sardinia, whose flavor has a more expansive, more stirring quality. Capers, particularly the Provençal ones, are usually pickled in vinegar. They have the advantage of lasting indefinitely, especially if refrigerated after being opened. The drawback is that the vinegar alters their flavor, making it sharper than it needs to be. In Italy, particularly in the South, capers are packed in salt, and they taste better. They are available in markets abroad as well, particularly in good ethnic groceries. Their disadvantage is that, before they can be used, they must be soaked in water 10 to 15 minutes and rinsed in several changes of water, otherwise they will be too salty. Nor can they be stored for as long as the vinegar-pickled kind because, when the salt eventually absorbs too much moisture and becomes soggy, they start to spoil. The color of the salt is an indication of the capers’ state of preservation. It should be a clean white; if it is yellow the capers are rancid.

  FONTINA

  Fontina is made from the unpasteurized milk of cows that graze on mountain meadows in the Val d’Aosta, the Alpine region of Italy that adjoins France and Switzerland. Fontina has many imitators, both inside and outside Italy, but only the Val d’Aosta version has the sweet, distinctly nutty flavor that makes it probably the finest cheese of its kind. It is ideal for melting in a Piedmontese-style fonduta, or over gratinéed asparagus, or to bind a slice of prosciutto to a sautéed scallop of veal. Its buttery taste is exceptionally delicate but, unlike that of its imitators, not insignificant. It is ideal for cooking when you want the subtlest of cheese flavors.

  GARLIC

  Aglio

  To equate Italian food with garlic is not quite correct, but it isn’t totally wrong, either. It may strain belief, but there are some Italians who shun garlic, and many dishes at home and in restaurants are prepared without it. Nevertheless, if there were no longer any garlic, the cuisine would be hard to recognize. What would roast chicken be like without garlic, or anything done with clams, or grilled mushrooms, or pesto, or an uncountable number of stews and fricassees and pasta sauces?

  When preparing them for Italian cooking, garlic cloves are always peeled. Once peeled, they may be used whole, mashed, sliced thin, or chopped fine, depending on how manifest one wants their presence to be. The gentlest aroma is that of the whole clove, the most unbuttoned scent is that exuded by the chopped. The least acceptable method of preparing garlic is squeezing it through a press. The sodden pulp it produces is acrid in flavor and cannot even be sautéed properly.

  It is possible, and often desirable, for the fragrance to be barely perceptible, a result one can achieve by sautéing the garlic so briefly that it does not become colored, and then letting it simmer in the juices of other ingredients as, for example, when thin slices of it are cooked in a tomato sauce. On occasion, a more emphatic garlic accent may be appropriate, but never, in good Italian cooking, should it be allowed to become harshly pungent or bitter. When sautéing garlic, never take your eyes off it, never allow it to become colored a dark brown because that is when the offensive smell and taste develop. In a few circumstances, when the balance of flavors in a dish demand and support a particularly intense garlic flavor, garlic cloves may be cooked until they are the light brown color of walnut shells. For most cooking, however, the deepest color you should ever allow garlic to become is pale gold.

  Choosing and storing Garlic is available all through the year, but it is best when just picked, in the spring. When young and fresh, the cloves are tender and moist, and the skin is soft and clear white. The flavor is so sweet that one can be careless about quantity. As it ages, and unfortunately, outside of the growing areas, older garlic is what one will find, it dries, losing sweetness and acquiring sharpness, its skin becoming flaky and brittle, its flesh wrinkled and yellow, like the color of old ivory. It is still good to cook with, but you must use it sparingly and cook it to an even paler color than you would the fresh. I have seen chefs split the clove to remove any part of it that may have turned green. I don’t find this necessary, but I do discard the green shoot when it sprouts outside the clove.

  Choose a head of garlic by weight and size. The heavier it feels in the hand, the fresher it’s likelier to be, and large heads have bigger cloves that take longer to dry out. Use only whole garlic, do not be tempted by prepared chopped garlic, or garlic-flavored oils, or powdered garlic. All such products are too harsh for Italian cooking.

  Keep garlic in its skin until you are ready to use it. Do not chop it long before you need it. Store garlic out of the refrigerator in a crock with a lid fitting loosely enough so air can flow through. There are perforated garlic crocks made that do the job quite well. Braids of garlic can look quite beautiful hanging in a kitchen, but the heads dry out fairly quickly and all you will have left at some point are empty husks.

  MARJORAM

  Maggiorana

  It is the herb most closely associated with the aromatic cooking of Liguria, the Italian Riviera, where it is used in pasta sauces, in savory pies, in stuffed vegetables, and—possibly most triumphantly—in insalata di mare, seafood salad. Its bewitchingly spicy and flowery aroma vanishes almost entirely when marjoram is dried. One should make every possible effort to get it fresh or, failing that, frozen.

  MORTADELLA

  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but, in the case of mortadella, it has come closer to character assassination. The products that call themselves mortadella or go by the name of the city where it originated, Bologna, have completely obscured the merits of perhaps the finest achievement of the sausage-maker’s art.

  The name mortadella may derive from the mortar the Romans used to employ to pound sausage meat into a paste before stuffing it into its casing. Another explanation suggests that the origin of the name can be traced to the myrtle berries—mirto in Italian—that were once used to aromatize the mixture. The lean meat of which mortadella is composed—the shoulder and neck from carefully selected hogs—together with the jowl and other parts of the pig that the traditional formula requires, is, in fact, ground to a creamy consistency before it is studded with half-inch cubes of fine hogback mixed with a blend of spices and condiments that varies from producer to producer, and stuffed into the casing. Every step of the operation is critical in the making of mortadella, but the one that follows after it is cased is probably the one most responsible for the texture and fragrance that characterize a superior product. Mortadella is finished only when it has undergone a special cooking procedure. It is hung in a room where the temperature is kept at 175° to 190° Fahrenheit, and there it is slowly steamed for up to 20 hours.

  Mortadella comes in all sizes, from miniatures of one pound to colossi of 200 or more pounds and 15 inches in diameter. The latter, for which a special beef casing must be used, is the most prized because it takes longer to cook and develops subtler, finer flavors. When it is cut open, the fragrance that rises from the glowing peach-pink meat of a choice, large, Bolognese mortadella is possibly the most seductive of any pork product.

  Mortadella’s uses In the cooking of Bologna, minced mortadella is used to enrich the flavor of the stuffing of tortellini and of ground meat dishes such as meat loaf. Cut into sticks, it is breaded and fried as part of a fritto misto or a warm an
tipasto. It is also served thickly sliced as part of an antipasto platter of cold meats. On a Bolognese table, you will often find a saucer of mortadella cut into half-inch cubes. Probably its greatest service to the nation has been in keeping alive generations of school children sent to class breakfastless, but with a roll in their satchel that is generously stuffed with sliced mortadella to bring sustenance to the traditional mid-morning interval.

  BUFFALO-MILK MOZZARELLA

  Mozzarella di Bufala

  At one time, all mozzarella was di bufala, made from water buffalo milk. The buffalos graze on the pastures of Campania, the southern region of which Naples is the capital. Their milk is much creamier than cow’s milk, and the cheese it produces is velvety in texture, pleasingly fragrant and, unlike other mozzarella, it has decided flavor, being sweet and, at the same time, delicately savory.

  Pizza, when it was created in Naples, was always made with mozzarella di bufala. It is too expensive an ingredient today for commercial pizza, but it will immeasurably enhance homemade pizza, and such preparations as parmigiana di melanzane. It is, moreover, the mozzarella to choose, if you have the choice, for a caprese salad, which consists of mozzarella slices, sliced ripe tomatoes, and basil.

  NUTMEG

  Noce Moscata

  We probably have the Venetians to thank for making nutmeg, along with other Eastern spices, available in Italy, but it is in Bolognese cooking that it has put its most tenacious roots. Nutmeg is indispensable to Bolognese meat sauce, and to the stuffings for its homemade pasta. It is used elsewhere too, such as in sauces with spinach and ricotta, in certain savory vegetable pies, in some desserts. One must use it carefully because, if a shade too much is added, the warmth of its musky flavor is lost in a dominant sensation of bitterness.

  Use only whole nutmegs, which you can store in a tightly closed glass jar in a kitchen cabinet. Grate the nutmeg when needed, easily done on its special, small, curved grater. Any grater with very fine holes will do the job, however.

  EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL

  Olio d’Oliva Extra Vergine

  Of all the grades of oil that can be marketed as olive oil, the only one a careful cook should look for is “extra virgin.” To qualify as “virgin” an olive oil must be cold-processed, produced solely by the mechanical crushing of the whole olive and its pit, wholly excluding the use of chemical solvents or any other technique of extraction. The varying degrees of “virginity” are determined by the percentage of oleic acid contained. The highest grade, “extra virgin,” is reserved for oils with 1 percent oleic acid or less. If the percentage of acid exceeds 4 percent, the oil must be rectified to lower the acid content and then it may no longer be labeled “virgin.” Up until 1991, it was sold as “pure,” a term that may have been technically accurate but did not seem to be an appropriate handle for the lowest marketable grade of olive oil.

  Choosing an extra virgin olive oil Italian oils offer such a broad range of aromas and flavors that, when a representative selection is available, one can experiment with a view to choosing the oil that best supports one’s own style of cooking. The oils produced on the Veneto side of Lake Garda and on the hills north of Verona are probably Italy’s finest, certainly its most elegant: sweetly fragrant, nutty, with a gossamer touch on the palate. Those from Liguria are shier of flavor, but they have a thicker, more viscous feel. The oils from central Italy—of Tuscany and Umbria—are penetratingly fruity and, those of Tuscany in particular, even spicy and scratchy. The oils that come from further south have the scent of Mediterranean herbs—rosemary, oregano, thyme, with appley, almost sweet, pronouncedly fruity flavor. The only way to determine which one pleases one’s palate most is to try as many as possible. The tasting qualities to look for, no matter what the other characteristics of the oil may be, are sensations of liveliness, freshness, and lightness. Avoid oils that taste fat, that feel sticky, that have earthy or moldy odors.

  Storing olive oil Olive oil is perishable, sensitive to air, light, and heat. The Italian ministry of agriculture recommends that it be used within a year and a half after it is bottled. It can be kept in its original container, if unopened, for that much time, or slightly longer, if stored in a cool, dark cupboard or in a wine cellar. Once opened, it should be used as soon as possible, certainly within a month or six weeks. Keep it in a bottle with a tight closure. Do not keep it in one of those oil cans with a spout unless you use it up rather quickly. If an opened bottle of oil has been around for some time, smell it before using it and, if it smells and tastes rancid, discard it or it will spoil the flavor of anything you cook.

  Cooking with olive oil It is sometimes suggested that while one should choose the very best oil one can for a salad, it’s all right to use a lower grade for cooking. Such advice is flawed by a flagrant contradiction. One chooses an olive oil because of its flavor, and that flavor is no less critical to a pasta sauce, or to a dish of vegetables, than it is to a lettuce leaf. Once you have had spinach or mushrooms or a tomato sauce cooked in marvelous olive oil, you will not willingly have them any other way.

  If taste is the overriding consideration, use the olive oil with the finest flavor as freely for cooking as for salads. If other factors, such as cost, must be given priority, cook with olive oil less often, replacing it with vegetable oil, but in those less frequent circumstances when you’ll be turning to olive oil, cook with the best you can afford.

  OLIVES

  Olive

  The olives used most commonly in Italian cooking are the glossy, round, black ones known in Italy as greche, Greek. They should not be confused with the other familiar variety of Greek olive, the purple Kalamata, elongated, tapering at the ends, whose flavor is ill suited to Italian dishes.

  When cooking with olives, it’s preferable to add the olives at the very last, when the sauce, the fricassee, the stew, or whatever you are making, is nearly done. Cooking olives a long time accentuates their bitterness.

  OREGANO

  Origano

  Botanically speaking, oregano is closely related to marjoram, but its brasher scent is more closely associated with the cooking of the South, with pizza and with pizza-style sauces. It is excellent in some salads, with eggplant, with beans, and extraordinary in salmoriglio, the Sicilian sauce for grilled swordfish. Unlike marjoram, oregano dries perfectly.

  PANCETTA

  Pancetta, from pancia, the Italian for belly, is the distinctive Italian version of bacon. In its most common form, known as pancetta arrotolata, it is bundled jelly-roll fashion into a salami-like shape. To make pancetta arrotolata, the rind is first stripped away, then the meat is dressed with salt, ground black pepper, and a choice of other spices, which, depending on the packer, may include nutmeg, cinnamon, clove, or crushed juniper berries. It is moister than bacon because it is not smoked. When it has been cured for two weeks, it is tightly rolled up and tied, then wrapped in organic or, more commonly, artificial casing. At this point, it can be eaten as is, as one would eat prosciutto. It is more tender and considerably less salty than prosciutto. Its more important use, however, is in cooking, where its savory-sweet, unsmoked flavor has no wholly satisfactory substitute. Some Italians use a similarly cured, flat version of pancetta still attached to its rind, known as pancetta stesa. Pancetta is never smoked except in Italy’s northeastern regions—Veneto, Friuli, Alto Adige—where a preference for flat, smoked bacon similar to North American slab bacon, is one of the legacies of a century of Austrian occupation.

  PARMESAN

  Parmigiano-Reggiano

  Common usage bestows the name “Parmesan” on almost any cheese that can be grated over pasta, but the qualities of a true Parmesan—rich, round flavor and the ability to melt with heat and become inseparable from the ingredients to which it is joined—are vested in a cheese that has no rivals: parmigiano-reggiano.

  What is parmigiano-reggiano? The name is stringently protected by law. The only cheese that may bear it is produced—by a process unchanged in seven centuries—from the pa
rtly skimmed milk of cows raised in a precisely circumscribed territory mainly within the provinces of Parma and Reggio Emilia in the region of Emilia-Romagna. The totally natural process—nothing is added to the milk, but rennet; the long aging of eighteen months; the flora and the microorganisms that are specific to the pastureland of the production zone—all are contributors to the taste of parmigiano-reggiano and to the way it performs in cooking, qualities no other cheese can claim in the same measure.

  How to buy it, how to store it If you have the choice, do not buy a precut wedge of parmigiano-reggiano, but ask that it be cut from the wheel. To protect the cheese’s special qualities, one must keep it from drying out. The more it is cut up, the more it loses moisture, until it begins to taste sharp and coarse. For the same reason, never buy any Parmesan in grated form and, at home, grate it only when you are ready to use it.

  Take a careful look at the cheese you are about to buy. It should be a dewy, pale amber color, uniform throughout, without any dry white patches. In particular, look at the color next to the rind: If it has begun to turn white, the cheese has been stored badly and is drying out. If there is a broad chalk white rim next to the rind, the cheese is no longer in optimum condition. If there are no visible defects, ask to taste it. It should dissolve creamily in the mouth, its flavor nutty and mildly salty, but never harsh, sharp, or pungent.

  When you have found an example of parmigiano-reggiano that meets all requirements, you might be well advised to buy a substantial amount. If it is more than you expect to use in two or three weeks’ time, divide it into two pieces, or more if it is exceptionally large. Each piece must be attached to a part of the rind. First wrap it tightly in wax paper, then wrap it in heavy-duty aluminum foil. Make sure no corners of cheese poke through the foil. Store on the bottom shelf of your refrigerator.