Italian cooking legend Marcella Hazan, puffing on a Marlboro Light in a borrowed office at The French Culinary Institute, faced a dilemma.
The class she was to teach that night for a dozen students who had come from around the globe to see her would focus on preparing Swiss chard. Alas, the school’s usual purveyors hadn’t delivered any.
She dispatched her husband, Victor, to the markets of lower Manhattan to seek out the elusive greens. “Maybe the Chinese place has some,” Hazan said.
The problem was nothing new for her. Hazan has been tracking down ingredients both rare and common-and showing others how to turn them into authentic Italian cuisine-for more than 30 years, since her first book, “The Classic Italian Cook Book,” appeared in 1973 and established her reputation.
It is probably one of the first two or three cookbooks I ever purchased in my life,” said Tony Mantuano, chef/partner at Spiaggia, Chicago’s highly regarded Italian restaurant. “Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but here is someone whose [dishes] have not been polluted by American taste buds. They are directly imported.”
I, too, discovered Hazan’s cooking early in life, only I didn’t know it. Some of my favorite foods growing up were Italian staples like lasagna and spaghetti with meat sauce. I had always assumed these dishes were closely guarded family secrets, brought to this country by my relatives who sailed here from northern Italy in the early 1900s.
I happened upon “The Classic Italian Cook Book” two years ago while leafing through some books at my parents’ house. As I flipped through it, I found something disconcerting: The cookbook included each of those “family” recipes. And the pages on which they appeared were marred by the kind of tomato-hued finger smudges that come only from heavy use.
My mother had been busted. And I was hooked.
There was little doubt that Hazan’s book contained the secrets of Italian home cooking. I immediately wanted to attend one of her classes.
Hazan is now 80 years old. After writing her fifth cookbook, “Marcella Cucina,” in 1997, she pledged to retire. She moved from her home in Italy to Florida’s Gulf Coast, where her son, Giuliano, and his family live. Giuliano also teaches and writes about Italian cuisine.
But a life of leisure did not suit the famously cantankerous Hazan, so she set to work on her most recent book, the recently released “Marcella Says …” (HarperCollins, $29.95).
She also began teaching again, a few classes a year in New York. I signed up for a November class. Though I had come to admire Ha zan’s cooking largely through the rich Bolognese sauce made by my mother, I found that Hazan emphasizes a simpler, more frugal kind of Italian cooking.
“They put everything too much,” she pronounced, her thick accent emphasizing her dislike for pasta drowning in sauce. “What you leave out is as important as what you put in.”
Her classes and books also bring forth a type of Italian cooking that might seem unfamiliar to some. Those who equate Italy with garlic, beware.
“The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” Hazan writes. She once entered a restaurant, smelled the odor of garlic, and left be fore being seated.
Ditto for the rosemary and basil that litter the food at your neighborhood Italian joint.
“Any time I hear someone say, ‘I like to use a lot of herbs in my cooking,’ I think: Look out,” Hazan said. She uses only salt-plenty of salt-along with Tellicherry peppercorns, jalapenos and an occasional sprinkling of freshly grated nutmeg.
Her favorite dish is a saute of rapini (broccoli rabe), garlic, anchovy and chilies over pasta. “I hope never to become so feeble that I am unable to respond to the potent call of this dish,” she writes.
The call to cooking, however, did not begin until she married Victor, a wine writer, in 1955.
“He can cope with many bad things in life, but not a bad meal,” Hazan said. “I had to learn to cook.”
Her first forays into the kitchen involved recreating dishes her family had served when she was growing up in Cesenatico, a fishing village on Italy’s Adriatic coast.
“My way of learning was to try to remember what I was eating,” she said. “The more I did it the more I found out I liked to do it.”
The teaching career that followed-she has taught in Bologna and in Venice-al-so began serendipitously. Despite holding degrees in biology and natural sciences, Hazan did not work when she and Victor moved to New York, so she had time on her hands. Her love of Chinese cooking compelled her to sign up for a class. When the instructor left for a sabbatical, other classmates asked a surprised Hazan to teach them Italian cooking.
“My first reaction was that the Americans were all crazy,” Hazan recalled. Nonetheless, she agreed to teach, and the classes were a hit.
When they were included in a New York Times listing of cooking schools, legendary food editor Craig Claiborne called her for an interview.
Soon Hazan was cooking lunch for him.
“I think maybe he didn’t have anything else to write,” she said.
Claiborne enjoyed the meal and suggested Hazan write an Italian cookbook.
“I said no. I didn’t know anything about writing a cookbook.”
But, after more encouragement from Claiborne, she was soon hard at work on her first manuscript, and arrived at a working arrangement with Victor that they’ve used for each of her books: “My husband translates,” she said. “I put down what I want to say, and he puts it in nice English.”
Hazan’s first book focused on the type of mainstay dishes that one might find in any good Italian restaurant or home.
Her latest book, like the class in New York, offers the kind of advice that will help home cooks go beyond recipes. They might actually help them cook like an Italian.
For instance, the Publix supermarket near her Florida home is not great, Hazan said, but it always has good-looking avocados and savoy cabbage. Because making the best of fresh ingredients is a time-honored tradition in Italy, page 344 of “Marcella Says …” has a recipe for savoy cabbage salad with avocado.
“If I can write a book [with food from] this grocery store, anyone in America can use it,” she said.
The book also supplies information that Hazan feels is essential in under standing Italian cooking. She realized that her classes often ran for five hours each night, but only a few minutes were spent going through recipes.
The nuts and bolts of cooking-choosing a pan for pasta sauce, prepping vegetables, and tricks to ensure savory results-were, she realized, essential. But she hadn’t included enough of this information in her previous cookbooks.
She said she thought to herself: “Soon I will stop teaching and all that will be lost.”
As an example, she delves into the slippery notion of insaporire, or “making tasty,” which is achieved by building ingredients upon each other. A cook making a soup base might start by sauteing onions. Celery is added, and only when the celery is done does the cook add diced carrot and garlic.
“They catch the taste of the previous ingredient,” Hazan said. “It’s much more tasty.”
Hazan also urges students to embrace painstaking preparation work. Green peppers and other vegetables with skins are peeled before they’re included in a dish. Others, like Swiss chard, are blanched, then roasted or sauteed. Nobody seems to mind. But a National Public Radio crew from Washington, also in attendance at the class, couldn’t hide disappointment earlier when a private cooking lesson with Hazan never materialized. She was too busy.
They were mollified by the meal she served in class: ravioli stuffed with Swiss chard and pancetta, followed by a soul-warming braised veal and a tangy dish of sauteed rapini and chickpeas.
She doesn’t hesitate to point out the failings of her students, whether they’ve added too much flour to their pasta dough or haven’t paid sufficient attention.
“You talk too much,” she said to one chatterbox during her recent class.
Some fans treasure a rebuke from Hazan. Celebrity chef and restaurateur Mario Batali didn’t make a good first impression with Hazan when she first saw his show on the Food Net work.
“For her, to cook risotto there’s only one way,” Batali explained. “There’s one pan, one kind of rice and one kind of stock. She was dogging me because I used a saute pan instead of a stockpot on TV.
“Her intolerance of me,” he said, “was beautiful and poetic and funny.”
But it is Hazan’s insistence on authenticity, he added, that makes her such an icon.
Some of Hazan’s cookbooks are out of print. However we found many of them on amazon.com; your local bookstore also may be able to order several of these titles if they are not in stock. Also, some online sites specialize in books that are out of print: Visit abebooks.com and alibris.com.
The Classic Italian Cookbook: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973)
More Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)
Marcella’s Italian Kitchen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. This is a compilation of her first two books)
Marcella Cucina (HarperCollins, 1997)
Marcella Says … (HarperCollins, 2004)
(Orecchiette con rapini)
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 6 servings
Adapted from “The Classic Italian Cookbook: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating,” by Marcella Hazan; the original recipe used broccoli. Orecchiette, a disc-shaped pasta (it translates to “little ears”), is sold in Italian markets and some larger supermarkets; penne or shells can be substituted. Rapini, or broccoli rabe, is a pleasantly sharp-tasting green that is sold alongside kale and chard. It can be found in produce and Italian specialty markets, some larger supermarkets and natural food stores such as Whole Foods Market.
1 pound dried orecchiette pasta
4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 bunch rapini, about 1 pound, trimmed
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
3 anchovy fillets, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup grated pecorino Romano cheese
1. Cook pasta according to package instructions; drain and set aside. Meanwhile, heat water and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add rapini; cook until crisp-tender, about 8 minutes. Drain in colander; cool under cold running water. Drain; set aside.
2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in anchovies; cook 1 minute. Stir in rapini, garlic and red pepper flakes. Cook, stirring constantly, until garlic softens, about 5 minutes.
3. Toss pasta with rapini mixture in a large serving bowl. Drizzle with remaining 1/4 cup of the olive oil and cheese; toss.
Nutrition information per serving:
460 calories, 38% of calories from fat, 19.5 g fat, 4 g saturated fat, 10 mg cholesterol, 56 g carbohydrates, 15 g protein, 586 mg sodium, 2.5 g fiber
(Minestrone alla Romagnola)
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Cooking time: About 3 hours
Yield: 8 servings
Adapted from “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” by Marcella Hazan. Adding a piece of Parmesan cheese rind lends a nice flavor to any vegetable or chicken soup.
1/2 cup olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 large carrot, diced
2 ribs celery, diced
2 russet potatoes, peeled, diced
2 zucchini, diced
1/2 pound green beans, diced
1/2 large head cabbage, shredded
1 can (14 1/2 ounces) beef broth
1 piece Parmesan cheese rind, exterior scraped clean, optional
4 cups water
2 3 cup canned Italian tomatoes with their juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 can (14 ounces) cannellini or great Northern beans, drained, rinsed
1 3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1. Combine the oil, butter and onion in a stockpot over medium-low heat; cook until the onion wilts and turns golden, about 6 minutes. Add the carrots; cook, stirring once or twice, 2 minutes. Repeat with celery, potatoes, zucchini and green beans, cooking and stirring each 2 minutes. Add the cabbage; cook, stirring occasionally, until it wilts, about 6 minutes.
2. Add the broth, cheese rind, water, tomatoes and their juice, and salt. Cover; cook, stirring often, until thick, about 21/2 hours. Add cannellini beans; cook 15 minutes. Add water to thin soup, if desired. Remove cheese rind from soup; swirl in grated cheese.
Nutrition information per serving:
447 calories, 39% of calories from fat, 20 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 15 mg cholesterol, 55 g carbohydrates, 16 g protein, 587 mg sodium, 15 g fiber
(Lasagne verdi al forno)
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Cooking time: 2 hours, 45 minutes
Resting time: 10 minutes
Yield: 8 servings
Although this recipe looks complicated, the lasagna can be made over two days. Both the Bolognese and bechamel sauces can be made a day ahead and refrigerated. Marcella Hazan stresses homemade pasta, but in a pinch commercial dried spinach lasagna noodles may be substituted. You may have extra pasta sheets; they can be wrapped well and frozen. Adapted from Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook.”
Bolognese sauce:
3 tablespoons each: olive oil, butter
2 tablespoons each, chopped: yellow onion, celery, carrot
3/4 pound ground lean beef
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup milk
1 8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 can (14 1/2 ounces) chopped Italian tomatoes, with their juice
Spinach lasagna noodles:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 3 cup cooked, chopped, squeezed-dry spinach
1/4 teaspoon salt
Bechamel sauce:
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
To assemble:
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons butter
1. For the Bolognese sauce, heat oil and butter in a Dutch oven over medium heat; add onion. Cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add celery and carrot; cook gently 2 minutes. Add beef; crumble the beef with a wooden spoon. Add salt. Cook, stirring, until the meat begins to brown, about 4 minutes. Add the wine; increase heat to medium-high. Cook, stirring occasionally, until all the wine has evaporated, about 12 minutes. Decrease heat to medium; add milk and nutmeg. Cook, stirring often, until all the milk has evaporated, about 6 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes; cook until tomatoes begin to boil, about 3 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, about 2 hours.
2. Meanwhile, for the noodles, combine all ingredients in a food processor; process to form a silky smooth ball that leaves the sides of the bowl, about 3 minutes. Cover dough in plastic wrap; set aside 20 minutes. Cut dough in half; roll out one half, using a pasta machine, as thin as it will go. Cut into four pieces (12-by-4 1/2-inches each). Repeat with other half. Set aside.
3. For the bechamel, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour; cook, stirring, until bubbly and thick, about 2 minutes. Reduce heat to low; add the milk and salt. Cook, stirring, until the sauce is as thick as tomato puree, about 8 minutes. Remove from heat. Cover; keep warm.
4. Heat oven to 450 degrees; position rack in top third of oven. Heat a stockpot of salted water to a boil. Place 2 sheets of fresh pasta in boiling water until they float to the top, about 10 seconds; remove. Transfer pasta sheets to a bowl of ice water to cool. Remove from ice bath one sheet at a time; rinse under cold running water, rubbing carefully to remove starch. Drain well; place pasta on dry paper towels; pat dry with another towel. Repeat with remaining pasta sheets.
5. To assemble lasagna, spread some meat sauce (skimming from the top where there is more fat) on the bottom of a 13-by-9-inch baking pan. Place a layer of 2 pasta sheets on the bottom of the pan, overlapping the sheets no more than 1/4 inch. Lightly spread meat sauce on the pasta; spread with bechamel. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan. Repeat with 3 more layers of pasta. (Do not build up the layers any higher than 1/2-inch from the top of the pan.) Dot lightly with butter. Bake until a light golden crust forms on top, about 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack 10 minutes.
Nutrition information per serving:
425 calories, 56% of calories from fat, 26 g fat, 13 g saturated fat, 114 mg cholesterol, 27 g carbohydrates, 19 g protein, 1,121 mg sodium, 1 g fiber
Italian cooking legend Marcella Hazan, puffing on a Marlboro Light in a borrowed office at The French Culinary Institute, faced a dilemma.
The class she was to teach that night for a dozen students who had come from around the globe to see her would focus on preparing Swiss chard. Alas, the school’s usual purveyors hadn’t delivered any.
She dispatched her husband, Victor, to the markets of lower Manhattan to seek out the elusive greens. “Maybe the Chinese place has some,” Hazan said.
The problem was nothing new for her. Hazan has been tracking down ingredients both rare and common-and showing others how to turn them into authentic Italian cuisine-for more than 30 years, since her first book, “The Classic Italian Cook Book,” appeared in 1973 and established her reputation.
It is probably one of the first two or three cookbooks I ever purchased in my life,” said Tony Mantuano, chef/partner at Spiaggia, Chicago’s highly regarded Italian restaurant. “Authenticity is a word that gets thrown around a lot, but here is someone whose [dishes] have not been polluted by American taste buds. They are directly imported.”
I, too, discovered Hazan’s cooking early in life, only I didn’t know it. Some of my favorite foods growing up were Italian staples like lasagna and spaghetti with meat sauce. I had always assumed these dishes were closely guarded family secrets, brought to this country by my relatives who sailed here from northern Italy in the early 1900s.
I happened upon “The Classic Italian Cook Book” two years ago while leafing through some books at my parents’ house. As I flipped through it, I found something disconcerting: The cookbook included each of those “family” recipes. And the pages on which they appeared were marred by the kind of tomato-hued finger smudges that come only from heavy use.
My mother had been busted. And I was hooked.
There was little doubt that Hazan’s book contained the secrets of Italian home cooking. I immediately wanted to attend one of her classes.
Hazan is now 80 years old. After writing her fifth cookbook, “Marcella Cucina,” in 1997, she pledged to retire. She moved from her home in Italy to Florida’s Gulf Coast, where her son, Giuliano, and his family live. Giuliano also teaches and writes about Italian cuisine.
But a life of leisure did not suit the famously cantankerous Hazan, so she set to work on her most recent book, the recently released “Marcella Says …” (HarperCollins, $29.95).
She also began teaching again, a few classes a year in New York. I signed up for a November class. Though I had come to admire Ha zan’s cooking largely through the rich Bolognese sauce made by my mother, I found that Hazan emphasizes a simpler, more frugal kind of Italian cooking.
“They put everything too much,” she pronounced, her thick accent emphasizing her dislike for pasta drowning in sauce. “What you leave out is as important as what you put in.”
Her classes and books also bring forth a type of Italian cooking that might seem unfamiliar to some. Those who equate Italy with garlic, beware.
“The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” Hazan writes. She once entered a restaurant, smelled the odor of garlic, and left be fore being seated.
Ditto for the rosemary and basil that litter the food at your neighborhood Italian joint.
“Any time I hear someone say, ‘I like to use a lot of herbs in my cooking,’ I think: Look out,” Hazan said. She uses only salt-plenty of salt-along with Tellicherry peppercorns, jalapenos and an occasional sprinkling of freshly grated nutmeg.
Her favorite dish is a saute of rapini (broccoli rabe), garlic, anchovy and chilies over pasta. “I hope never to become so feeble that I am unable to respond to the potent call of this dish,” she writes.
The call to cooking, however, did not begin until she married Victor, a wine writer, in 1955.
“He can cope with many bad things in life, but not a bad meal,” Hazan said. “I had to learn to cook.”
Her first forays into the kitchen involved recreating dishes her family had served when she was growing up in Cesenatico, a fishing village on Italy’s Adriatic coast.
“My way of learning was to try to remember what I was eating,” she said. “The more I did it the more I found out I liked to do it.”
The teaching career that followed-she has taught in Bologna and in Venice-al-so began serendipitously. Despite holding degrees in biology and natural sciences, Hazan did not work when she and Victor moved to New York, so she had time on her hands. Her love of Chinese cooking compelled her to sign up for a class. When the instructor left for a sabbatical, other classmates asked a surprised Hazan to teach them Italian cooking.
“My first reaction was that the Americans were all crazy,” Hazan recalled. Nonetheless, she agreed to teach, and the classes were a hit.
When they were included in a New York Times listing of cooking schools, legendary food editor Craig Claiborne called her for an interview.
Soon Hazan was cooking lunch for him.
“I think maybe he didn’t have anything else to write,” she said.
Claiborne enjoyed the meal and suggested Hazan write an Italian cookbook.
“I said no. I didn’t know anything about writing a cookbook.”
But, after more encouragement from Claiborne, she was soon hard at work on her first manuscript, and arrived at a working arrangement with Victor that they’ve used for each of her books: “My husband translates,” she said. “I put down what I want to say, and he puts it in nice English.”
Hazan’s first book focused on the type of mainstay dishes that one might find in any good Italian restaurant or home.
Her latest book, like the class in New York, offers the kind of advice that will help home cooks go beyond recipes. They might actually help them cook like an Italian.
For instance, the Publix supermarket near her Florida home is not great, Hazan said, but it always has good-looking avocados and savoy cabbage. Because making the best of fresh ingredients is a time-honored tradition in Italy, page 344 of “Marcella Says …” has a recipe for savoy cabbage salad with avocado.
“If I can write a book [with food from] this grocery store, anyone in America can use it,” she said.
The book also supplies information that Hazan feels is essential in under standing Italian cooking. She realized that her classes often ran for five hours each night, but only a few minutes were spent going through recipes.
The nuts and bolts of cooking-choosing a pan for pasta sauce, prepping vegetables, and tricks to ensure savory results-were, she realized, essential. But she hadn’t included enough of this information in her previous cookbooks.
She said she thought to herself: “Soon I will stop teaching and all that will be lost.”
As an example, she delves into the slippery notion of insaporire, or “making tasty,” which is achieved by building ingredients upon each other. A cook making a soup base might start by sauteing onions. Celery is added, and only when the celery is done does the cook add diced carrot and garlic.
“They catch the taste of the previous ingredient,” Hazan said. “It’s much more tasty.”
Hazan also urges students to embrace painstaking preparation work. Green peppers and other vegetables with skins are peeled before they’re included in a dish. Others, like Swiss chard, are blanched, then roasted or sauteed. Nobody seems to mind. But a National Public Radio crew from Washington, also in attendance at the class, couldn’t hide disappointment earlier when a private cooking lesson with Hazan never materialized. She was too busy.
They were mollified by the meal she served in class: ravioli stuffed with Swiss chard and pancetta, followed by a soul-warming braised veal and a tangy dish of sauteed rapini and chickpeas.
She doesn’t hesitate to point out the failings of her students, whether they’ve added too much flour to their pasta dough or haven’t paid sufficient attention.
“You talk too much,” she said to one chatterbox during her recent class.
Some fans treasure a rebuke from Hazan. Celebrity chef and restaurateur Mario Batali didn’t make a good first impression with Hazan when she first saw his show on the Food Net work.
“For her, to cook risotto there’s only one way,” Batali explained. “There’s one pan, one kind of rice and one kind of stock. She was dogging me because I used a saute pan instead of a stockpot on TV.
“Her intolerance of me,” he said, “was beautiful and poetic and funny.”
But it is Hazan’s insistence on authenticity, he added, that makes her such an icon.
Some of Hazan’s cookbooks are out of print. However we found many of them on amazon.com; your local bookstore also may be able to order several of these titles if they are not in stock. Also, some online sites specialize in books that are out of print: Visit abebooks.com and alibris.com.
The Classic Italian Cookbook: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating (Alfred A. Knopf, 1973)
More Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1978)
Marcella’s Italian Kitchen (Alfred A. Knopf, 1986)
Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking (Alfred A. Knopf, 1992. This is a compilation of her first two books)
Marcella Cucina (HarperCollins, 1997)
Marcella Says … (HarperCollins, 2004)
(Orecchiette con rapini)
Preparation time: 10 minutes
Cooking time: 20 minutes
Yield: 6 servings
Adapted from “The Classic Italian Cookbook: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating,” by Marcella Hazan; the original recipe used broccoli. Orecchiette, a disc-shaped pasta (it translates to “little ears”), is sold in Italian markets and some larger supermarkets; penne or shells can be substituted. Rapini, or broccoli rabe, is a pleasantly sharp-tasting green that is sold alongside kale and chard. It can be found in produce and Italian specialty markets, some larger supermarkets and natural food stores such as Whole Foods Market.
1 pound dried orecchiette pasta
4 cups water
1 teaspoon salt
1 bunch rapini, about 1 pound, trimmed
1/4 cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
3 anchovy fillets, chopped
2 cloves garlic, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
1/2 cup grated pecorino Romano cheese
1. Cook pasta according to package instructions; drain and set aside. Meanwhile, heat water and salt to a boil in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat. Add rapini; cook until crisp-tender, about 8 minutes. Drain in colander; cool under cold running water. Drain; set aside.
2. Heat 3 tablespoons of the olive oil in a large skillet over medium-high heat. Stir in anchovies; cook 1 minute. Stir in rapini, garlic and red pepper flakes. Cook, stirring constantly, until garlic softens, about 5 minutes.
3. Toss pasta with rapini mixture in a large serving bowl. Drizzle with remaining 1/4 cup of the olive oil and cheese; toss.
Nutrition information per serving:
460 calories, 38% of calories from fat, 19.5 g fat, 4 g saturated fat, 10 mg cholesterol, 56 g carbohydrates, 15 g protein, 586 mg sodium, 2.5 g fiber
(Minestrone alla Romagnola)
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Cooking time: About 3 hours
Yield: 8 servings
Adapted from “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” by Marcella Hazan. Adding a piece of Parmesan cheese rind lends a nice flavor to any vegetable or chicken soup.
1/2 cup olive oil
3 tablespoons butter
1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
1 large carrot, diced
2 ribs celery, diced
2 russet potatoes, peeled, diced
2 zucchini, diced
1/2 pound green beans, diced
1/2 large head cabbage, shredded
1 can (14 1/2 ounces) beef broth
1 piece Parmesan cheese rind, exterior scraped clean, optional
4 cups water
2 3 cup canned Italian tomatoes with their juice
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 can (14 ounces) cannellini or great Northern beans, drained, rinsed
1 3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
1. Combine the oil, butter and onion in a stockpot over medium-low heat; cook until the onion wilts and turns golden, about 6 minutes. Add the carrots; cook, stirring once or twice, 2 minutes. Repeat with celery, potatoes, zucchini and green beans, cooking and stirring each 2 minutes. Add the cabbage; cook, stirring occasionally, until it wilts, about 6 minutes.
2. Add the broth, cheese rind, water, tomatoes and their juice, and salt. Cover; cook, stirring often, until thick, about 21/2 hours. Add cannellini beans; cook 15 minutes. Add water to thin soup, if desired. Remove cheese rind from soup; swirl in grated cheese.
Nutrition information per serving:
447 calories, 39% of calories from fat, 20 g fat, 5 g saturated fat, 15 mg cholesterol, 55 g carbohydrates, 16 g protein, 587 mg sodium, 15 g fiber
(Lasagne verdi al forno)
Preparation time: 40 minutes
Cooking time: 2 hours, 45 minutes
Resting time: 10 minutes
Yield: 8 servings
Although this recipe looks complicated, the lasagna can be made over two days. Both the Bolognese and bechamel sauces can be made a day ahead and refrigerated. Marcella Hazan stresses homemade pasta, but in a pinch commercial dried spinach lasagna noodles may be substituted. You may have extra pasta sheets; they can be wrapped well and frozen. Adapted from Hazan’s “The Classic Italian Cookbook.”
Bolognese sauce:
3 tablespoons each: olive oil, butter
2 tablespoons each, chopped: yellow onion, celery, carrot
3/4 pound ground lean beef
2 teaspoons salt
1 cup dry white wine
1/2 cup milk
1 8 teaspoon nutmeg
1 can (14 1/2 ounces) chopped Italian tomatoes, with their juice
Spinach lasagna noodles:
1 1/2 cups flour
2 eggs
1 3 cup cooked, chopped, squeezed-dry spinach
1/4 teaspoon salt
Bechamel sauce:
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter
3 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
1/4 teaspoon salt
To assemble:
2/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons butter
1. For the Bolognese sauce, heat oil and butter in a Dutch oven over medium heat; add onion. Cook until translucent, about 3 minutes. Add celery and carrot; cook gently 2 minutes. Add beef; crumble the beef with a wooden spoon. Add salt. Cook, stirring, until the meat begins to brown, about 4 minutes. Add the wine; increase heat to medium-high. Cook, stirring occasionally, until all the wine has evaporated, about 12 minutes. Decrease heat to medium; add milk and nutmeg. Cook, stirring often, until all the milk has evaporated, about 6 minutes. Stir in the tomatoes; cook until tomatoes begin to boil, about 3 minutes. Reduce heat to medium-low. Cook, uncovered, stirring occasionally, about 2 hours.
2. Meanwhile, for the noodles, combine all ingredients in a food processor; process to form a silky smooth ball that leaves the sides of the bowl, about 3 minutes. Cover dough in plastic wrap; set aside 20 minutes. Cut dough in half; roll out one half, using a pasta machine, as thin as it will go. Cut into four pieces (12-by-4 1/2-inches each). Repeat with other half. Set aside.
3. For the bechamel, melt the butter in a medium saucepan over medium heat. Add the flour; cook, stirring, until bubbly and thick, about 2 minutes. Reduce heat to low; add the milk and salt. Cook, stirring, until the sauce is as thick as tomato puree, about 8 minutes. Remove from heat. Cover; keep warm.
4. Heat oven to 450 degrees; position rack in top third of oven. Heat a stockpot of salted water to a boil. Place 2 sheets of fresh pasta in boiling water until they float to the top, about 10 seconds; remove. Transfer pasta sheets to a bowl of ice water to cool. Remove from ice bath one sheet at a time; rinse under cold running water, rubbing carefully to remove starch. Drain well; place pasta on dry paper towels; pat dry with another towel. Repeat with remaining pasta sheets.
5. To assemble lasagna, spread some meat sauce (skimming from the top where there is more fat) on the bottom of a 13-by-9-inch baking pan. Place a layer of 2 pasta sheets on the bottom of the pan, overlapping the sheets no more than 1/4 inch. Lightly spread meat sauce on the pasta; spread with bechamel. Sprinkle with grated Parmesan. Repeat with 3 more layers of pasta. (Do not build up the layers any higher than 1/2-inch from the top of the pan.) Dot lightly with butter. Bake until a light golden crust forms on top, about 15 minutes. Cool on wire rack 10 minutes.
Nutrition information per serving:
425 calories, 56% of calories from fat, 26 g fat, 13 g saturated fat, 114 mg cholesterol, 27 g carbohydrates, 19 g protein, 1,121 mg sodium, 1 g fiber
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