Scott Conant's New Italian Cooking

The book is great for the home cook. There are recipes for all types of courses plus very helpful and interesting comments by the chef about each dish. Pictures are beautiful and inspiring.

At first perusal I felt some reservations about Scott Conant's modernizations and reworkings of classic Italian fare, but these were misfounded. Conant really is one of those exceedingly rare chefs who can take a classic dish and bring it to new life through creativity, free thinking, and great technical chops. So, after cooking many of his recipes, I can comfortably and gratefully say that Conant knows his way around the international kitchen. No doubts there. Trouble is, several of these recipes just don't work. I know that in saying this I'm in danger of admitting incompetence in the kitchen. But I am a very accomplished home cook and I have never experienced the same frustrations cooking from Marcella Hazan's equally refined recipes. I have to conclude, with respect for the chef, that whatever alterations he and writer Joanne Smart made to the restaurant recipes [to make them suitable for home kitchens] were not carefully edited. For example: the Tuna Poached in Olive Oil Infused with Thyme, Rosemary, and Lemon was realy quite bad, despite two attempts with premium ingredients, including sushi-grade tuna. The results were overpoweringly flavored of thyme and Rosemary, and the fish turned to an indigestibly oily mush. Not edible. I consulted our excellent neighborhood seafood-loving chef, who suggested reducing the herbs to 1/10 of what's in the recipe, using the oil as a marinade at room temperature, and then searing the tuna briefly. I did this and loved it. Note that my attempts cost me 40 ounces of premium tuna at $10.99/lb, and two QUARTS of my best olive oil. Grrrr. I wish this recipe were a fluke. The Silken Brussels Sprouts for Two, besides being a nuisance to make, has resisted several attempts at something appealing: it results in an unattractive, oily mass. It tastes pretty good, but if I were to serve it as part of a "romantic dinner for two", as the author suggests, I would lose my dinner date and spend the evening wiping olive oil off the stove, alone. I have several other black marks in the margins of this book. But there have been glorious successes, too. The White Bean and Escarole Soup is excellent. The Braised Short Ribs have great bang for the buck. The Warm Fagiolini and Goat Cheese Salad is very nice indeed, and the Wild Mushroom Ravioli is outrageously yummy. I could go on. Some of these recipes suffer from their trip from restaurant to home kitchen. Read the recipes carefully before you start, and remember that art-house cuisine is a high-wire act that few can follow, no matter how competent we are as home cooks.

`Scott Conant's New Italian Cooking' by, you guessed it, Scott Conant (chef-owner of L'Impero in New York City) and cooking writer for hire, Joanne McAllister Smart impresses me as being the kind of book I was really expecting from Terrance Brennan's `Artisanal Cooking'. While it is not quite as cerebral as Paul Bertolli's `Cooking by Hand', it is definitely more thoughtful than some other leading neuvo Italian cookbooks such as those from Rose Gray and Ruth Rodgers of London's River Café or their irrepressible protégé, Jamie Oliver. While Oliver and River Café offer lots of smart but easy recipes, Conant gives us somewhat more involved recipes dealing much less with pasta and more with some of Italy's more exotic ingredients such as bottarga (dried, pressed fish roe) and guanciale (cured pig's jowls). And Senor Conant is totally unapologetic about using these hard to get ingredients. While my hero Mario Batali will often specify this ingredient and say you can substitute pancetta, Conant insists that the real guanciale have a flavor that simply cannot be reproduced by protein from some other part of the pig. Conant's sense of `new Italian' cooking is also different from Mario, who, with his love of ramps and other local ingredients, sees himself as adapting the Italian concentration on local ingredients with those ingredients which are local to the farms around the New York metropolitan area. Conant relies on purely Italian ingredients with an emphasis on Italian techniques such as carpaccio that may not be familiar to most American fans of Italian cuisine. Conant is also very big on pairing dishes with wine and being almost totally ignorant of wines, I will take it for granted that Senor Conant knows what he is talking about in this area and, if wine is your thing with Italian food, this book is doubly valuable to you. Conant's culinary center of gravity seems to be the northern coasts of Italy, with much more risotto, polenta, and gnocchi dishes than dishes with dried pasta. He also does a lot with seafood. Many of the recipes in this book are relatively easy. But, on average, they are not as easy as Rodgers, Gray, and Oliver. Many recipes also seem to be not too far removed from the professional kitchen, as there are a lot of instructions for prepping up to a point and bringing to table readiness at the last minute. This restaurant orientation also gives us several very interesting pantry preparations. One, in particular, is a ginger flavored oil which almost seems like a throwback to the Medieval European lust for oriental spices including ginger and the now-rare galangal. The book is also filled with very nice insights about Italian cuisine and food in general. I found his comment on salmon very interesting when he said that he rarely serves salmon as a main course, as it is easy to become bored with the tastes from a big chunk of this fish. I never thought of this before, but it is really true that grilled or poached salmon can get ol