Soffritto, a mixture of onion, garlic, and other ingredients such as carrots and celery, was once sauteed in lard, but she used oil and butter, insisting that you add the vegetables to the pot consecutively, rather than all at once, which is more common. Imperative in Marcella’s recipes - especially pasta sauces, risotto, and soups - is soffritto (known in French cooking as mirepoix), which adds richness and depth to the dish. She was not the first Italian author - previous books include (translated titles here) “ The Science of Cooking and the Art of Eating Well,” by Pellegrino Artusi “ The Talisman Italian Cook Book” by Ada Boni and “ The Silver Spoon.” None explained what Marcella could, as an Italian transplant in America looking at the transmogrified cooking of 19th-century Southern Italian immigrants.
She taught readers about prized ingredients: Parmesan, Arborio rice, porcini, olive oil, all with their Italian names, many of which, years later, would roll off our tongues. Aside from time-consuming handmade pasta, everything Marcella did was within reach if you had some decent cooking skills. These techniques may have been centuries-old in Italy, but they were new to us. Marcella did things in the kitchen few of us had ever seen: tossing a large Parmesan rind into a simmering pot of minestrone, braising pork in milk, cooking beef in milk for Bolognese, adding an onion and butter to the tomato sauce that would become her trademark (the recipe ran with her 2013 obituary in the New York Times), stuffing a roast chicken with two small lemons, making her cakes with olive oil rather than butter.
This was Northern Italian cooking seen through the eyes of a native of Emilia-Romagna who had advanced degrees in natural sciences and biology.
Here, pastas were not bathed in long-simmered tomato sauces, the way they were in Boston’s North End. Weary of French butter sauces and potato gratins, I was eager to explore the new Italian cooking that in the early ‘80s was becoming the thing in a handful of forward-looking American restaurants. It came from an early Marcella Hazan cookbook, and whatever Marcella said to do, I did. It comes out of the oven golden brown on top and a little crusty - a delicious dish that takes an enormous effort. When it’s done cooking, you lift it out, slice it thickly, lay the slices in a baking dish, and spoon over bechamel sauce and freshly grated Parmesan cheese. Then you spread it with a mixture of pureed spinach and ricotta, roll it up, wrap it tightly in cheesecloth, secure the ends with kitchen twine, and lower your gigantic sausage into a stockpot of boiling water. How’s this for a recipe that will take an entire afternoon? You make pasta dough and roll it out to the size of your work table.
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