Marcella Says...: Italian Cooking Wisdom from the Legendary Teacher's Master Classes, with 120 of Her Irresistible New Recipes

This Summer, for my family I made Marcella's recipe for Sicilian Pesto from this book. I followed the recipe to the letter, and my family was blown away. It was so delicious, so nuanced, and surprising (you think, pesto, I know pesto. well guess again). Can't wait to try more of these recipes and have everyone think I'm a genius.

I made the puree of fava beans with rapini. The recipe said simmer 1 lb rapini in 4c water. I think she meant 4 quarts. Same night, lamb shanks with savoy cabbage. "Cook the shanks about one hour or until meat falling off bones" and "serve immediately". (paraphrasing). The braising took over two hours, and tasted better the next day. When I make it again (and I will), I'll cook it a day ahead and reheat. On the other hand, both were excellent and excellent together. I'm just going to trust my instincts about off-sounding details.

Marcella Says ... is the closest most home cooks will ever come to having Marcella Hazan by your side in the kitchen. Her talent is in providing you the tips and insights -- in plain English -- how and why good Italian cooking can taste its best -- and these are techniques that can be applied to almost any type of cooking. If you enjoy cookbook authors who have a conversational style of writing, but tell you the essentials of bringing out the flavor of ingredients that you can buy in your grocery store -- then Marcella Says is the book for you!

If you have one Italian cookbook or a hundred, you still need this book! It belongs to an elite class of cookbooks which explain how and why techniques we have seen on dozens of `Molto Mario' and `Naked Chef' and `Ciao Italia' shows for years, and explains them in terms which are easy to understand, practical to apply to new recipes, and make it easier to successfully improvise in cooking. Marcella Hazan has long been the first among the leading writer / educators of general Italian cuisine such as Lydia Bastianich and Giuliano Bugialli plus the great regional specialists such as Lynn Rosetto Kaspar and baking specialists such as Carole Field. And, she has been doing it for close to 30 years, long before the current crop of excellent advocates of genuine regional Italian cooking. This legion of writers have produced mountains of books on the cooking of great Italian restaurants, whole mountain ranges of books on cooking from the various regions of Italy, both individually and collectively, and whole libraries of great books on Italian influenced cuisine from transplanted Italiophiles such as Jamie Oliver and Rose Gray and Ruth Rodgers. And yet, very few of these books have explained much of Italian cooking with an analytical eye honed by decades of practice. The only book on cooking which comes close to this enormously revealing work is Paul Bertolli's book `Cooking by Hand'. And, even this excellent book suffers in comparison in that it overlays common sense techniques with the obsessions of a professional chef which a home cook will typically find much to extreme to embrace with an equal vigor. This, Ms. Hazan succeeds not only in turning an analytical eye on everyday cooking techniques, but she also presents her observations with a simplicity which even the most casual cook of pasta and sauces can appreciate. The first sign that I was dealing with a very important book was when I began reading Ms. Hazan's discussion of `insaporire', an Italian culinary term which Hazan believes has no easy English translation, yet an understanding of this term explains the technique, `arrosolare' behind thousands of different Italian inspired recipes. `arrosolare' is the technique whereby an ingredient is sautéed with just the right amount of heat for just the right amount of time to reach a state of `insaporire' where just the right taste has been coaxed from the food. An important aspect of this state and technique is that they are best done to individual ingredients that are then combined in a dish after each as been brought to the perfect state of tastiness. The simplest example of this is the very common technique of heating garlic in a fat to just slightly brown, when the garlic is either removed from the fat or the temperature of the pan is lowered by adding another ingredient, usually onions. The technique for making risotto is offered as another prime example of `insaporire', in that rice is added to the base ingredients of oil and savory flavori

I pre-ordered this book based on how much I enjoyed two of her other books, not only to cook from, but to read cover to cover like a novel. I have cooked several recipes from it already to great acclaim from my discriminating family. I am about half way through reading it and can't wait to get back to it...so this will be a short review. Bravo, Marcella! The recipes are well written, but not over-explained, clear without being too wordy. Be prepared to find some really interesting food ideas for making often. This book will have pride of place in my kitchen. My only regret is that it would have been nice to have some photos of the food included, not just line drawings.