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Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is the book that taught the English speaking world what Italian food actually is, and it remains unsurpassed.
Marcella Hazan was born in Cesenatico in Emilia Romagna and had earned a doctorate in natural sciences and biology when she married and moved to New York in 1955. She had never cooked. She learned out of necessity, from Italian cookbooks and from memories of her mother's kitchen. When a Chinese cookery course she had enrolled in was cancelled in 1969, the other participants asked her to teach Italian cooking instead, and the following year Craig Claiborne wrote about her in The New York Times. That settled it.
The book appeared in 1992 and combined her two earlier works from 1973 and 1978 in revised form. The text was written in Italian and rendered into English by her husband Victor, which gives the prose a dry precision few cookbooks possess.
What she did was demolish the idea of Italian food as heavy, garlicky and drowned in sauce. Her Italy is regional, restrained and driven by ingredients. Pasta should be dressed with sauce, not swimming in it. The water should be properly salted and never oiled. Fewer ingredients, more time, less interference.
The most famous recipe is also the simplest. Tomatoes, an onion cut in half, five tablespoons of butter and salt, simmered for 45 minutes, after which the onion is discarded. Nothing else. That sauce has been cooked by more people than most recipes in history and sums up her entire approach.
The difference between this and much else with canonical status is that the recipes actually work. This is not a book you own, it is a book you use until the spine gives out.
Hazan died in 2013. The book has long since become the reference work against which every later Italian cookbook is measured.
Publisher: Boxtree
ISBN: 9780752227900
Language: English
First published: 1992
The Kitchen Lab Selection
This is barely an Italian cookbook. What Hazan teaches is an approach. Fewer ingredients, more time, and a reason for every step. It is an approach you can carry into any kitchen, and it will make you better at cooking Thai food too.
Hazan earned a doctorate in the natural sciences before she cooked her first meal, and it shows in the way she writes. She has a scientist’s aversion to unsupported claims and does not merely tell you what to do, but also explains what happens if you do the opposite. That was unusual in 1992 and remains unusual today.
More importantly, the book has endured. Thirty years later, her dishes are cooked by people who do not know they are hers, and her rules are repeated by people who have never heard her name. That is about as close as a cookbook can come to becoming part of the language.
