Essentials of Italian Cooking – Marcella Hazan
I am obsessed with this cook book. Though it pains me in my loins to not just DUMP garlic in every dish we make, I’ve never made something that didn’t come out melting panties. There are SO many Italian cook books out there, but after spending some time old Italian cities, the new shiny ones with lots of pretty pictures and young white people on the cover just didn’t seem authentic. I don’t want your interpretation of your old Italian grandma’s dishes from the motherland, I want the original, granny smacking your knuckles with the rolling pin if you touch the fresh cannolis, original.
This cookbook is so freaking authentic that there are no photographs of any of the dishes anywhere, its only hand drawn sketches of everything. My simple mind struggled with this.
And may I say that Marcella is a very saucy old lady, she will frequently tell you what she thinks is absolute garbage with how other people cook (ie: with pasta machines or any tomato that isn’t a god damn plum tomato imported from the mother land) and I love her for this. Its like 90’s thug kitchen but without the swearing, just passive aggressive comments immortalized into print.
This book teaches you how to pick out every single ingredient, has a troubleshoot section for if your pasta doesn’t come out right, lets you pick your own sauces for all the pasta dishes, has sample menus in the back per season and occasion (because fuck you if you think you can have a ‘sumptuous summer dinner’ during the ‘rustic winter’), and is just in general the best cookbook I’ve ever owned.
The phrase “but that’s not what Marcella SAID to do, Paul” is thrown around a lot in our house.
You’ll notice that all the recipes are really short and simple. There’s rarely a recipe with more than 1o ingredients. If you read my post about what I learned in Italy, this book successfully encompasses that mentality of the obsession with quality for a minimalistic dish.
Anyways, I want to fill a bathtub with her meatball recipe and just be at peace. You should join me.