This Short Passage From Marcella Hazan Made Me A Vastly Better Cook

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Because my mother is a good Italian cook, I have always had a basic understanding of Italian cooking, which is to say I knew you were supposed to supposed to start by frying onions and garlic. Recently, however, I had a breakthrough, which I attribute to my mother's gift of an old copy of "The Essentials Of Italian Cooking" (1992) by Marcella Hazan.

Hazan died yesterday at the age of 89. Her significance is described in a New York Times obituary: "The impact Mrs. Hazan had on the way America cooks Italian food is impossible to overstate. Even people who have never heard of Marcella Hazan cook and shop differently because of her, and the six cookbooks she wrote."

She had an impact on me from the beginning of a chapter on "Fundamentals."

Hazan details the exact process and utmost importance of using onions, garlic, and a few other ingredients to create a base for almost every dish. Following a variation on this process in every dish that requires it - and not just when there happen to be onions in the pantry - has already made me a vastly better cook.

Here's an excerpt:

BATTUTO

The name comes from the verb battere, which means "to strike," and it describes the cut-up mixture of ingredients produced by "striking" them on a cutting board with a chopping knife. At one time, the nearly invariable components of a battuto were lard, parsely, and onion, all chopped very fine. Garlic, celery, or carrot might be included, depending on the dish. The principal change that contemporary usage has brought is the substitution of olive oil or butter for lard, although many country cooks still depend on the richer flavor of the latter. However formulated, a battuto is at the base of virtually every pasta sauce, risotto or soup, and of numberless meat and vegetable dishes.

SOFFRITTO

When a battuto is sautéed in a pot or skillet until the onion becomes translucent and the garlic, if any, becomes colored a pale gold, it turns into a soffritto. This step precedes the addition of the main ingredients, whatever they may be. Although many cooks make a soffritto by sautéing all the components of the battuto at one time, it makes for more careful cooking to keep the onion and the garlic separate. The onion is sautéed first, when it becomes translucent the garlic is added, and when the garlic becomes colored, the rest of the battuto. The reasons are two: one, if you start by sautéing the onion, you are creating a richer base of flavor in which to sauté the battuto; two, because the onion takes longer to sauté than garlic, if you were to put both in at the same time, by the time the onion becomes translucent the garlic would be too dark. If, however, your battuto recipe calls for pancetta, cook the onion and pancetta together to make use of the pancetta's fat, thus reducing the need for other shortening.

An imperfectly executed soffritto will impair the flavor of a dish no matter how carefully all the succeeding steps are carried out. If the onion is merely stewed or incompletely sautéed, the taste of the sauce, or the risotto, or the vegetable never takes off and will remain feeble. If the garlic is allowed to become dark, its pungency will dominate all other flavors.

INSAPORIRE

The step that follows a soffritto is called insaporire, "bestowing taste." …

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.

And that's how you create flavor.

The first dish I made after reading this was a minestrone, based loosely on a recipe later in the book but following all of her fundamentals. It was delicious and vastly better than a soup I made last year, to which I felt compelled to add bottled Caribbean sauce at the end to enhance the flavor.

"Essentials" goes on to give a candid discussion of the components, from anchovies to water, and only then gets into the actual recipes. I've got a lot to learn.

Read Hazan's obituary at the Times, browse "Essentials" on Google Books, and buy her cookbooks at Amazon.