Hazan serves up old-fashioned advice
Marcella Hazan, the queen of Italian cooking in America, is nearing the end of her reign. But before she leaves the throne, she has a few more messages to deliver: Don’t shy away from salt, don’t overdose on herbs and, above all else, remember that, when you are cooking, your job is to coax the maximum flavor out of each ingredient.
Be warned: This may sound simple, but it is not necessarily easy. There is, Marcella says, a rigor to good cooking. Details matter.
She is old-school, a wise old head who believes in stressing fundamentals, perfecting techniques, scoffing at the froufrou.
When she sees a chef on a cooking show throwing together what she regards as discordant ingredients, she has the urge to smack some sense into him.
She also has the credentials to slap some hands. At 80, she has published six seminal cookbooks, including her self-proclaimed finale, Marcella Says (HarperCollins, $29.95), released this fall.
Over the years she has taught cooking classes in Bologna and Venice, Italy, and New York before moving five years ago to the west coast of Florida to be near her son, Giuliano, a chef and cookbook writer who has taken up his mother’s culinary mantle.
A few weeks ago, during a luncheon interview in New York, Marcella and her husband, Victor, the author of a well-regarded book on Italian wine, once again held forth on her classic concepts of Italian cooking.
With her silver hair and husky voice, interspersing Italian with English, Marcella is very much the teacher in charge.
Her career as a cooking teacher began almost by default. She was living in New York and taking a course in Chinese cooking when the teacher took a sabbatical in China. Marcella’s classmates looked around for something else to cook until the teacher came back and asked her to teach them what she cooks at home. In October 1969, she gave her first class in a New York City apartment to six of her former classmates and has been at it ever since.
One of the questions Marcella is often asked is how to tell when a dish is done. While there are visual clues that help, such as when the butter or oil in a cooked tomato sauce begins to run clear, the definitive answer rests with the tongue. “It is done,” Marcella says, “when it tastes done.”
Getting to the point where your tongue knows the answer comes, Marcella says, from mastering the art of “insaporire.” This is an Italian word that roughly translated means “making tasty.” It is a central concept in Italian cooking, she says, and consists of drawing out the flavor of ingredients by manipulating heat and the order that ingredients are placed in a pan.
You saute chopped onion in oil over medium heat until it reaches the desired shade of brown, she says. Then you put in a vegetable or the first of several vegetables. You raise the heat and stir the vegetable, coating it well until it opens up and swells with the flavor of the browned onions. That, she says, is “insaporire.”
When cooking a stew, “insaporire” means that you reverse the order of ingredients in the pan. First, the meat goes in a hot pan to brown in very hot fat. When it picks up color, the meat is removed from the pan, the heat is lowered and the onion and garlic are put in the pan to brown.
Next the meat is put in the pan with the onions and garlic and the vegetables are added. The tomatoes wait until the other vegetables have cooked enough to become “rosy,” Marcella says. If the tomatoes are added too soon, she says, their juices will flood the pan, causing the other vegetables to steam rather than saute.
“I don’t cook concepts,” Marcella says. “I use my head, but I cook from the heart.”
Rather than dazzle guests at the dinner table with a display of her creativity, Marcella would rather make a dish well, one that she has made for 50 years, one that her mother made.
Blunt, even flinty, Marcella is not shy about weighing in on what is wrong with the current cooking scene in America.
One peeve is serving pasta with a pool of sauce on top. Don’t do it, she says, no matter how pretty it looks. Instead, toss the pasta with the sauce immediately after draining it. Pasta must not sit and wait; it should be served immediately, she says. The plates for the pasta should be warmed, she adds. But she admits that the warm plate rule is one that her son Giuliano sometimes breaks.
Herb abuse, cooks throwing “armfuls of herbs” at food, is another trend that distresses Marcella. “Herbs are there to support an intrinsic flavor … not strut in front of it,” she says. Very few dishes can tolerate excessive herbage, she says.
To her, certain herbs are usually linked to certain dishes.
“When I go in a house and smell rosemary,” Marcella says, “I know meat is probably cooking in the kitchen. If I smell basil, then it is pesto; oregano, it is pizza; sage, some game.”
Marcella is not afraid to speak up for old practices, such as using salt and frying vegetables, even though they may be out of favor in some trendy circles.
“The gastronomic importance of salt is huge,” she says. “Cooking that lacks salt lacks flavor,” she says and makes a compelling case that, when used correctly, salt “unbuttons” the natural flavor of ingredients. A key to judicious salting, she says, is to use it primarily during the cooking process.
As for frying, Marcella says it can be a smart way to prepare vegetables, stripping away the rawness while keeping the juiciness, taste and texture of the vegetables intact. Her keys to success: Never overwhelm the hot oil — fry vegetables in small, sequential batches — and let the vegetables cool on a wire rack rather than on paper towels, which will make the cooling vegetables soggy.
One of the reasons she wrote Marcella Says was to spell out her core beliefs one last time. “After 35 years of teaching, I have gotten smarter. I have found a better way of saying things,” she says.
Fricasseed Chicken Asti Style with Pancetta, Peppers and Herbs
From Marcella Says ” (HarperCollins, 2004, $29.95)
3- to 3 1/2 -pound chicken cut into 12 pieces
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons butter
1 slice pancetta, 3 ounces, about 1/3 inch thick, cut into narrow strips
2 long sprigs Italian parsley and 2 sprigs fresh rosemary, tied with string
Fine sea salt to taste
Fresh ground black pepper to taste
1 cup dry white wine
4 meaty bell peppers
3 to 4 garlic cloves, peeled, finely chopped
4 flat anchovy fillets, finely chopped
1/4 cup red-wine vinegar
Wash the chicken and pat it dry with a paper towel and remove fat you find in front and rear cavities. Cut the bird into 12 pieces: 2 drumsticks, 2 thighs, 2 wings, 2 pieces from the back and 4 from the breast.
Pour the oil into a 12-inch skillet or pan, add the butter, the pancetta and the parsley and rosemary bouquet. Turn the heat onto high. When the fat gets hot, saute the ingredients for a few seconds. Then add the chicken, skin side down.
Brown the chicken deeply on one side, then turn and brown on the other side, about 20 minutes in all. Remove the breast pieces to a deep dish and save.
Sprinkle salt and pepper on the chicken pieces in the pan. Add the white wine, turn the chicken down to medium and continue to cook for another 40 minutes, turning the chicken from time to time.
Turn on the broiler.
While the chicken is cooking, wash the bell peppers, put them on a baking sheet and place under preheated broiler. Turn the peppers from time to time until the skin is charred all over.
When their skins are blackened, put them in a plastic bag and close the bag tightly.
Wait about 10 minutes to 12 minutes, until the peppers have cooled enough to handle, then take them out of the bag and pull off all the skins. Spilt each pepper lengthwise, remove the stem, seeds and pithy core and cut into 1-inch squares.
Put the chopped garlic and anchovies into a saucer or very small bowl and mash them together, using the back of a spoon. Pour the vinegar over them, blending it with a spoon.
When the chicken meat in the skillet has become tender enough to come easily away from the bone, after about 40 minutes, return the breast meat to the pan with any juice that has accumulated in the dish, add the cut-up peppers, the garlic-and-anchovy mixture, some salt and pepper and turn all the ingredients, once or twice.
Cook over medium heat for about 15 minutes. If the pan juices become too runny, remove the chicken pieces only, using tongs, turn the heat up to high, scrape loose any cooking residues on the bottom of the pan, and when the juices have cooked down some, put the chicken back in the pan.
Turn the pieces over once or twice, then transfer the fricassee to a warm serving platter and serve promptly.
Yield: 4 to 6 servings
Approximate nutrition per serving: Unable to calculate.