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CHAPTER 1
Introduction: In Season
All things have their season: and in their times all things pass under heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die. A time to plant, and a time to pluck that which is planted. ... And I have known that there was no better thing than to rejoice and to do well in this life. For every man that eateth and drinketh, and seeth good of his labor, that is the gift of God.
— ECCLESIASTES 3
Anyone who has traveled in Italy and seen Italians at table notices the gusto with which they approach food and the endlessly renewed pleasure they take in it. Food in Italy is an occasion, a subject, an experience, a theme, an artifact, a celebration. You don't just eat in Italy: you look, you smell, you savor, you admire, you discuss, you deplore, you praise, you pass plates, you taste one another's dishes, you compare how they make the lasagna here with how your mother made it, or how the restaurant around the corner makes it, you argue, you order another dish, you cross-examine the waiter, you make him show you another fish or suggest a better wine, you all talk at once, you call for more bread, or more lemons, or extra-virgin olive oil, you prolong the dinner far beyond the ever-so-rational length of time Americans allot for fueling their systems, and because everybody is having such a good time, on the spur of the moment you order a bottle of Asti Spumante to finish up with, and you and everyone with you loves every nutritionally and dietetically excessive moment of it. Tomorrow you will probably make a magro dinner of frittata and green salad, but tonight you are seeing the good of your labor.
The rhythm and the spirit of Italian life grow out of a long-ingrained, deep-in-the-soul awareness of the truth of Ecclesiastes' ancient wisdom, whose simplicity and starkness much of twentieth-century activity, at least in this country, seems bent on evading. Americans pursue one health chimera after another, apparently persuading themselves that if they eat enough fiber and jog enough miles they will live forever, or if they forego butter and wine and the pleasures of the table in the days of their youth, they will prolong their tedious, toothless old age of flavorless food and perpetual boredom into an eternity of the same.
Even the current fad for "the Mediterranean diet" gets it all wrong: it's not just what you eat, but how you eat, how you live. It isn't simply a balance of fresh fruits and vegetables, lots of fish and little meat, that keeps Mediterranean peoples safe from heart attacks and strokes: worrying about such balances is in fact just another mistake, another element of stress in American life, one more thing to make your life a constant misery instead of a steady pleasure. What makes "the Mediterranean diet" work is pleasure: stepping out of the rat race long enough to realize that the delicacy of this trout — the cool, acid tang of this glass of Verdicchio — the gush of sweet nectar from this huge, golden pear — is exactly what you've been working for, that putting this simple, straightforward goodness on the table to share with your family and friends is the fruit of your labor, and it is worth it.
THE SEASONS
Seasonality is the heart and soul of Italian cooking. Whatever the region, local cooks throughout the peninsula depend on the simplest — and for Americans the hardest to guarantee — factor of all for the success of their dishes: fresh ingredients bursting with flavor. No agribusiness tomatoes in the middle of winter or mushy McIntoshes in July, but cherries and strawberries in the spring, and wild mushrooms and wild game in the fall, and all things between in their own time. Each season brings its impatiently anticipated pleasures, the sharp, clear flavors that are all the better for being rare: the year's first tiny peas or its first glistening purple eggplants, spring's baby lambs or the hearty, warming polentas of winter. We know a little of that in this country, mostly in summer, and mostly from our own gardens or nearby farm stands. Remember how your mouth waters for the first real tomato of summer, still smelling of the vine, its scarlet skin glowing like a tiny sun. Remember how you anticipate the first, fresh-picked corn of the summer, the plump, moist kernels marshaled in their perfect platoons, each bursting with sweetness and just begging for its supererogatory slatherings of butter and salt. Those kinds of pleasures — the sharpness of anticipation, the keen, clean, distinct taste of a vegetable or fish or fruit or flesh that is absolutely and perfectly itself — those are what seasonality in the kitchen is all about.
In Italy, each season has its characteristic flavors, tastes, and smells that are unmistakably its own. For instance: early summer for us is forever captured in the memory of the unexpected heat of a June day on a highway south of Rome, the sun white-hot in a cloudless sky, the saving shade of a grove of umbrella pines, the welcome chill of a carafe of pale, young Frascati, and the succulence of a panino ripieno con porchetta — a firm-crusted roll filled with juicy slices of white pork and translucent amber cracklings carved before our eyes from the herb-stuffed torso of a pig that was turning over wood embers, patiently tended by the same cheerful, unshaven factotum who fixed our sandwiches, fetched our wine, and in general presided over the merest excuse for a roadside restaurant that was clearly, for him, the finest dining place on earth. In those beautiful Frascati hills and that clear June light, who could disagree with him?
Italian cooking at its best doesn't just reflect the flavors of the changing season: it embodies and glorifies them. What Americans instinctively respond to in the Italian culinary style is its presentation of the purest, freshest foods as simply and with as little interference as possible — the great art of concealing art translated to the kitchen and the dinner table. That is also what makes Italian cooking so easily accessible to ordinary home cooks. It is not an haute cuisine in the sense of needing special training or unusual skills. What Italian cooking demands — working taste buds and a reasonable degree of attention — is well within the range of all but the palatally tone-deaf. What Italian cooking gives in return is the haute cuisine of every day, of every season: the fleeting flavors of nature's annual roll call of ingredients caught in their seasonal passage and fixed in dishes as delicious and diverse as the varying moods and weathers of nature itself.
The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen is designed to make those flavors available to American cooks. None of our recipes requires any special expertise, and most ingredients are supermarket-available. But our up-front advice is this: take the time to shop well for your fixings. If there is only one butcher shop in your town or neighborhood that sells really young, pale veal, patronize it. If there is only one greengrocer who carries fragrant leafy celery, unblemished artichokes, crisp spinach and green beans, firm young zucchini — patronize it. What you start with in Italian cooking determines what you end with. There are no disguises here — no sugars to homogenize flavors, no elaborate, concentrated sauces to disguise blandness. This is honest cookery: what you see is what you get.
Happy shopping, and happy dining!
THE SEASONINGS OF THE ITALIAN KITCHEN
As we were working on the recipes for this book and loaning them out to friends to try for us, we often got what seemed to us a strange response from experienced cooks and food lovers — something on the order of "But there's nothing in this recipe! Where are all the seasonings? Why are there no spices?" They found it hard to believe that a dish could really taste good with so few ingredients, and so ordinary-sounding ones, as most of the recipes in this book use. Making the recipes quickly changed their minds, and the pleasant surprise often led to an epiphany about Italian cookery, quickly followed by a conversion. It was a real conversion, too, because these recipes derive from a fundamentally different style of cooking than the ones most serious American cooks are familiar with.
Contemporary American and European cooking styles tend toward conspicuous complexity, dishes with a variety of strong flavors that join each other only on the plate. A meat will be braised with something, set in a pool of a separately made sauce whose ingredients are completely different from the meat's braising liquid, and both will be served with an equally independent garnish. The flavors don't mingle until they're in your mouth, and even then you are supposed to taste them as separate strands, not as a harmonious unity. Traditional Italian cooking, which most of our dishes are, takes mostly the opposite stance. Relatively small numbers of flavorings cook together and blend together to achieve a whole that may resemble either a rich orchestral symphony or a concerto highlighting one of the instruments — but never simultaneous solos from all the voices. The genius of Italian cooking clarifies and concentrates flavors rather than complicates them, which is one reason why it is a great everyday cuisine and always satisfying.
Here's a rundown of the major spices, herbs, and other seasonings you'll want to have on hand for making the recipes in this book and in most traditional Italian cooking.
The Spice Rack
In a way it's odd that Italian cooking is so sparing and conservative with spices, since so much of Italy's early wealth was founded on the spice trade with the Orient. Salt and black pepper, of course; red pepper, rarely in its ground forms (cayenne or paprika, for instance), more often flaked (in that state frequently used as a table condiment), but preferably dried whole, which moves it out of what we would consider the spice category (see below under "other").
Nutmeg appears quite often in Italian recipes, and not primarily in the dessert category. A fresh grating of noce moscato is frequently used to accent risotti, gnocchi, cooked greens, and braised meats. In the same way, Venetian and Genovese cooking make a fair use of cinnamon and cloves in recipes for meats or fowl. These are usually survivals from the glory days of both former republics, when between them they dominated the spice trade. And anywhere in the north you may find recipes calling for berries from the juniper bush, which occurs in the native forests. Saffron makes a virtuoso appearance in risotto alla milanese, and not much anywhere else.
The Herb Garden
More than spices, Italians love herbs (i.e., plants in which the foliage is used for seasoning, not the seeds, bark, or other anatomical parts) in cooking, and that mostly means herbs grown at home or picked in the wild. You see very few formal herb gardens in Italy, but it seems that almost every house with a bit of land around it has garden borders or hedges made of rosemary and bay laurel shrubs. (When a thirty-foot hedge of rosemary blooms, the bees go mad with joy!) Aromatic rosemary is more conspicuous in recipes than bay leaf, but both are very common.
Basil is of course the most glamorous of Italian cooking herbs. It's so loved that it often goes beyond flavoring to become an ingredient, as in pesto or in our rigatoni al basilico. But for us, the one absolutely indispensable culinary herb is flat-leaf parsley. Those who know parsley only as a frilly dab of emerald-green shrubbery that you push to the edge of the plate before you begin eating have a pleasant surprise in store. "Rear· parsley (as we think of the flat-leaf variety) has a less chlorophylly, more foodlike flavor that plays an important supporting role in innumerable Italian dishes.
Leaves of sage (especially with veal dishes), mint (especially in Roman cooking). And the oregano-marjoram-thyme family (ubiquitous) round out the Italian herb garden. Tarragon is an oddity in the cooking of Siena. Lavender is grown everywhere in Italy but is used for its scent, not in cooking. (Thankfully, there's nothing in Italy like some of the French herbes provençaux mixtures that are desperately heavy on lavender.)
Herbs are almost always used fresh — or at worst, this year's crop freshly dried. They are never purchased already powdered or ground, which destroys their flavor almost immediately. We feel strongly about this: You cannot use powdered sage, oregano, etc., in any of our recipes. They don't work. In fact, any dried herb you may have that has started to smell like tea leaves — even if it was once lovely — is too old and should be discarded forthwith.
Fats
Our highly reactionary sentiments on the subject of fats in cooking are elaborated in About Frying in Olive Oil, in the Summer section. All we'll add here is that the flavors of Italian dishes depend very strongly on the varying effects of different cooking fats. Generally, butter is commoner in the north and oil in the south, though crossovers are not unusual. But other fats have their specific purposes and lend their specific flavors to dishes too: especially lard and pancetta and prosciutto fat. As always in Italy, regional differences in cooking practices make emotions run high; a great Neapolitan chef we know says that Tuscans are crazy to cook beans in olive oil; that the true secret of pasta e fagiole is that you must cook the beans in lard.
It's a pity that the scientific voodoo of nutritional theory still hasn't reversed its excommunication of lard, as over the years it has recanted on olive oil and even butter. Whatever your convictions, we urge you, in using our recipes, not to assume that corn oil or peanut oil are perfectly good all-purpose cooking fats. Sure, they are — from the purely chemical standpoint. But not if you care about the taste of your food.
Other Seasonings
God is in the details, said Mies van der Rohe. As with architecture, so it is with cooking. The magic of most Italian recipes is in the use of small quantities of intense or aromatic ingredients of many kinds. Thus, under the heading of "seasonings" can be included:
* Cured meats: chopped salame and prosciutto (see About Prosciutto in the Winter section).
* Cheeses, usually grated (see About Parmigiano in the Winter section).
* Dried funghi porcini (see About Mushrooms in the Fall section).
* Dried peperoncino rosso (See About Peppers in the Fall section).
* Capers, the pungent bud of an exotic-flowered plant, packed in brine or salt and used extensively in southern Italian dishes, often in combination with:
* Olives, green or black, whole or chopped, in dozens of local varieties (though our recipes call most often for Gaetas, a luscious purple-to-black olive grown in a stretch of coastal country between Rome and Naples).
* Anchovies — good varieties of which, packed in salt, are clean and light-fleshed, nothing like the slimy, fishy-smelling morsels rightly abhorred by so many people.
* Garlic — firm, moist, white-fleshed, and not for you to be intimidated by. Garlic's intensity is easily controlled by the state in which you use it: a whole garlic clove cooked in a dish for a long time blends imperceptibly into the background; that same clove chopped and tossed in the pan at the end of cooking dominates the dish.
* Onion, celery, carrot — the first two, at least, indispensable for the battuto or soffrito, which is a mince of aromatic vegetables (usually including parsley and garlic, sometimes also meat), that is sautéed and used as the base for innumerable pasta sauces and meat dishes.
* Tomato paste — small quantities of which give body and acidity to sauces that might otherwise be fat and flaccid.
* Lemons — the yellow zest even more commonly than the juice.
* Wine and wine vinegar (yes, vinegar in cooking, not just to dress salads).
When you add a seasoning ingredient to a dish is also important in Italian cooking. The difference between, say, basil shredded and stirred into a stew two minutes before serving and whole basil leaves simmered along with the meat and its juices for two hours is highly significant: they're practically two different creatures.
That, in fact, is how Italian cooking controls the effect of many strong flavors, like garlic, anchovy, tomato paste, or peperoncino rosso, but it's equally true of milder-flavored ingredients. It's also one of the reasons that you can have three or four Italian recipes with almost-identical ingredient lists that nevertheless produce dishes of totally different character. Thus, when our recipes say to dress a dish at table with freshly ground pepper, grated parmigiano or pecorino, or olive oil, please don't regard those items as optional condiments, like ketchup on a hamburger. They're important last-minute ingredients of the dish.
HOW THIS BOOK WORKS
The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen is organized in several ways to help you think about these dishes and their place in your meal.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Seasons of the Italian Kitchen"
by .
Copyright © 1994 Diane Darrow and Tom Maresca.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
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