Sumptuous Summer Menu inspired by Marcella Hazan

The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is a wonderful collection of recipes, with explicit directions on timing and technique, to help you bring the best of Italian kitchens to your table. 

There is no such thing as Italian haute cuisine -  there are no high or low roads in Italian cooking. All roads lead to the home, to la cucina di casa - the only one that deserves to be called Italian cooking. (Marcella Hazan in the Introduction of Essentials)

Fresh pasta making was involved! Caroline brought her motor and we hitched it to Diane's hand cranked pasta machine to produce silken dough that was hand cut at the table, and then dropped into vigorously boiling water. You can't get pasta any fresher than this!

Our feast was inspired from the pages of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking:

Sumptuous Summer Menu

Venetian primi, salmon with radicchio and balsamic

Papparadelle with Red and Yellow Bell Pepper Sauce with Sausages

Roast chicken with lemons, followed by Green bean salad

Black and White Macerated Grapes

Affagato

Kaarina: Venetian primi, salmon with radicchio and balsamic 

wine match: , Nebiolo 2019 Fontanafredda DOC 

Marcella taught me to cook. Some 30-odd years ago my friend Ron returned to Canada from 12 happy years eating in Rome and gifted me two Marcella Hazan cookbooks. They came with apron strings attached. I was to learn Italian home cooking and invite him to dinner.

What I learned was not so much Italian – that is, what North Americans think of as Italian – but good every-day home cooking. It becomes dinner party fare by adding a course or two and serving the meal according to Marcella’s rules on the art of Italian dining.

The genius of Marella’s cucina is its simplicity and precision. You always, always, always start with the freshest ingredients – and not too many of them. Her recipes rarely call for more than a half dozen things. “What you keep out is as significant as what you put in,” she wrote in the Introduction to Marcella Cucina. (Her velvety tomato sauce of world renown has only three ingredients: tomatoes, onion and butter.) 

I chose Steamed Salmon with Radicchio and Balsamic Vinegar for our Epi lunch as an example of how a few carefully chosen, common ingredients can be transformed quickly into something quite unique. The main players in this Venetian production - salmon wrapped in radicchio, steamed and drizzled with Balsamic vinegar – seem an unlikely trio. The supporting cast is limited to EVOO and S&P. The result is perfect dinner party fare either as a primo or main course. I thought the dish needed a fruity full wine, so I chose a Nebbiolo, the Barolo grape. It played together very happily with the competing strong flavours, although I expect a good classic Chianti would also do the job.

Caroline: Papparadelle with Red and Yellow Bell Pepper Sauce with Sausages

wine match: La Luna e i Falo, Barbera D'Asti, 2017 Vita Colte DOCG

Having heard my fellow Epis frequently mention and reference Marcella Hazan, last winter I ordered a copy of her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. So in the hopes of putting the cookbook to good use, I took it with me on the boat this past summer. The stale sourdough bread was transformed into her panzanella. Laura’s green beans were cooked just right as per her precise instructions. And in preparation for our Wolfe Island pizza night, I read the section on pizza which also covers toppings. And if memory serves me right, Kaarina made her marinara topping in honour of the sailors anchored in Breaky Bay. Marcella was very much with me this summer. It all seemed so natural to celebrate her so we agreed to cook Italian her way for our September Epitourists lunch.

Things I learned when I prepared Marcella’s Red and Yellow Bell Pepper Sauce with Sausages served on fresh pappardelle:

• The cookbook was first published in 1973 at a time when Italian ingredients were not accessible in North America, so Marcella suggests the use of unbleached all purpose flour to make fresh pasta in lieu of the 00 or doppio zero. BUT, we can now purchase 00 flour! So, I made pappardelle: 200g of 00 flour, 2 eggs and a pinch of salt!
• Semolina di grano duro is for industrially produced pasta. She does not find it suitable for homemade pasta as it is “often too grainy”.
• The recipe says to peel the bell peppers. I have never peeled a pepper. I tried. It wasn’t pleasant. I gave up. I contemplated oven roasting them followed by a sweating session in a closed container and then removing their skin but, I feared that this would modify the texture of the peppers to an extreme. Marcella was watching… I feared her reprisal. In the end, I didn’t peel. Oh well! I did come to understand that there’s a reason behind her detailed instructions (hhmm, have I heard K mention this before?).
• Don’t let the simplicity of the ingredients fool you, this sauce is absolutely delicious. It is lightly sweet and velvety rich!
• One last word, I cut the sausage in tiny bite size pieces instead of her suggested 1/2” because it just looks prettier on the plate.

Diane: Roast chicken with lemons, followed by Green bean salad

wine match: Capitel Nicalo, Valpolicella, 2018 Tedeschi DOC Superiore

Roast chicken is a mainstay on home menus across the world, and this simple version is going into regular rotation at my house because it produces such delicious, moist, and lemony results.  

Roast chicken with lemons requires "No fat to cook with, no basting to do, no condiments but salt and pepper. After you put it in the oven you turn it just once." One technique I learned from Marcella's recipe was to soften the lemons by rolling them back and forth on the counter while applying pressure from the palm of your hand; then poking the lemons with a sharp stick so they release their steams and juices. The other secret here is to cook the bird, breast side up, for the first thirty minutes before flipping it over for the remainder of the cooking time (allow about 20 minutes per pound). Otherwise, the bird is self-basting. Active time: 15 minutes; total time, 2 hours.  

Likewise, her Green Bean salad was straightforward and simple. Soaking the green beans for ten minutes prior to cooking plumped them up. Ten minutes in boiling water and then snapping off each end, then dressing with fine quality olive oil, sherry vinegar, and maldon salts. The only quibble I had with this recipe was that snapping off the ends of the beans produced a lot of waste, although it did ensure that only the best and most favourable pieces were brought to table. 

Diane: Black and White Macerated Grapes

What a beautiful bowl of fruit! 

Although neither the black or white grapes from the grocery store could be as flavourful as Italian grapes in season, this was still a nice light dessert that was easy to pull together. Just halve the grapes, remove the seeds if any, and soak in the juice of freshly squeezed oranges with a tablespoon or two of sugar for two to three hours, and then serve.

Diane: Affagato

Pure vanilla ice cream with a splash of hot espresso marries hot with cold; light with dark. Simple and delicious!