The Classic Italian Cookbook was Marcella Hazan's very first cookbook, first published in 1973. Hazan was born in Italy and moved with to New York with her husband in the mid-fifties. She had never cooked when she lived in Italy, but quickly started preparing meals in order to create the flavors and dishes she knew and loved back home. That turned into a cooking school and a gig writing about food for the New York Times. Food historians credit her with bringing authentic Italian food to the United States. I picked up my copy at a thrift store (I seem to get a lot of cookbooks that way) recently. It's just a small trade paperback, but there are variety of editions available. It is a fantastic book to have a reference if you want to explore Italian cooking (although she says straight out in the book that really there is no such think as a single Italian cuisine, instead there are a variety of regional cuisines).
Being that I have something of an obsession with eggs (an increasingly well documented one, at that) it is no wonder that my copy seems to open automatically to the Frittata section. I am now planning one with artichokes for a brunch this weekend. I can't wait!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-10-2008 @ 12:24PM
Julie said...
We love frittata Marisa, I even have a special frittata pan that was my grandmother's. The rule was absolutely nothing else was to be made in that pan other than a frittata. My grandmother always told me the story of how the frittata was their version of cold cuts for sandwiches. They didn't have a lot of money, so her mother(my great grandmother)would put whatever leftovers she had such as potatoes or some greens into a frittata and slice it and put it between bread for the kids lunch.
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