Marcella's Musings

Whatever happened to talking at the table? Not briefing, not lecturing, not quizzing, but talking — real talking, the give-and-take of ideas, memories, observations, experiences, anecdotes. Let us set aside those cheerless dinners where silence prevails, or worse, where each family member is engrossed in a cell phone or other device. Real talking at a family table makes the meal. It is how children learn to express themselves, listen to others, feel that they belong to something larger than themselves. It is where family history is forged and transmitted. And, as it happens, when a meal tastes good, talk is likely to be good too.

The app made me think of how I was once asked by a famous writer on food whether I thought it was possible to learn how to cook from a book. Yes, I replied, it is indeed possible if the instructions are lucid, unambiguous, and comprehensive. The technology of this app, unlike that of any book, gives Giuliano the opportunity to demonstrate his recipes so that you can practically smell the pasta sauces. I wish such a tool had been available to me.

While we don't celebrate it in Italy, Happy Mother's Day to all who do.

As in an uncounted number of Italian dishes, the base of mine is onions, although in this instance, as I cook the onions in olive oil I sweat them — that is to say I sprinkle them with salt and partly cover the saucepan to draw out their flavor slowly, rather than let them color. Then I add the peas and just enough water to keep things moist, salt, cover the pan, and cook over low heat until the peas are tender. Some chopped flat-leaf parsley is stirred in at the end. That is all there is to it.

Frozen peas, a good brand, are a usable substitute, but if I were in a market and found a pile of plump green pea pods, nothing would stop me from buying several pounds.

I was intrigued yesterday to read in The New York Times Sunday Magazine an interview with Sandra Lee. I hadn't heard of her, but I learned that she is a TV cooking celebrity and the companion of Governor Andrew Cuomo. Sandra Lee believes that people who place too much importance on fresh ingredients are snobs. I'd hate to think of the devastating effect her presence in the White House would have on American cooking.

I was somewhat relieved to discover that the Governor himself loves fresh ingredients and actually cooks. Pity they can't trade places.

The blogger started with those, but added olive oil, a dozen garlic cloves, lemon zest, coriander seeds, and fresh thyme. I understand the temptation to improve a traditional dish. On occasion a really apt variation can enhance a recipe, but if it has survived one, two, three centuries and more without needing to be touched, perhaps it's because it has already reached its best expression. When you add a dozen garlic cloves — a dozen! — you are not doing something to it, then something more; you are vandalizing it.

When it comes to flavor, consensus over time is the foundation supporting traditional predilections. In those preparations where seafood is cooked or marinated in olive oil — linguine with clams, grilled whole fish — the texture and flavor of Parmesan cheese are incongruous. How do you explain incongruity? You either get it or you don't. This is not an absolute prohibition; in Venice, for example, bigoli in salsa is sometimes finished with a grating of cheese. But it is the exception, not the rule.

All the largest ones I blanched and peeled, ziplocked them, and every few days grabbed a fistful out of the fridge to snack on, serving them with shreds of pecorino or aged Manchego, a drizzle of olive oil and grating of black pepper. The smallest and most tender ones I cooked whole with onion and guanciale, olive oil, and a tiny bit of water, then ate them warm, pod and all. They were more delicious than anything I can remember eating in a long while. Don't ever let fresh favas pass you by if you see them.

The tuna must be packed in olive oil, ideally the belly portion, ventresca. The salad needs the density and firmness of the canned tuna; if you were to use fresh, even seared, it would fall apart in the salad and lose itself in the other ingredients. There are times when canned is the better ingredient, and this is one of them. Do not be tempted to "improve" this dish. It requires no improvement.

I was not expecting the world of food to change as radically as it has in recent years. I find myself in a world in which the notion of cooking as a craft has been seriously undermined. In its place, we have "creativity" and "innovation" — terms borrowed from fields where they properly belong. In cooking, they are too often a pretext for ignoring what is already best about it: its simplicity, its connection to the places where we live and the seasons that govern what we eat, and its power to gather family and friends around a table and give them joy.

Now I am back to the Moka — one less machine to argue with, lots more room on my counter, and terrific coffee. I have relearned what I knew and had stupidly forgotten: there is nothing in an espresso bar that a Moka cannot duplicate at home, at a fraction of the cost.

In case you missed the intent of the Marcus Aurelius quote, it was a barb lofted from France in my direction. But, pace, I have grown old, but not color blind. El Bulli and Modernist Cuisine may be examples of ingenuity and engineering — the same kind as a particularly resourceful video game — but they are not cooking in any sense that I understand cooking. When you sit down before a plate, the question that will determine whether the experience is memorable is simple: "Did it taste good?" Ingenuity alone will never get you there.

As with any other fat, you must take care not to let the oil smoke, but at temperatures below smoking, it is a perfectly safe and superbly flavorful cooking medium. The science: its high level of monounsaturated fats and antioxidants protect it from oxidation at high temperatures far better than other oils whose smoke points may be technically higher.

Tom Colicchio is a fine chef who knows very well what he is talking about when it comes to contemporary American cuisine. Unfortunately the same cannot be said when it comes to Italian cooking. In the Venetian, Lombard, and Piedmontese homes and restaurants — the three regions where risotto is most deeply rooted — risotto is all'onda, which means wavy, not runny. When you shake the plate, the risotto ripples gently like a wave. A good risotto holds its form beautifully when it is served. Tom Colicchio is simply wrong about this.

Al dente means "to the tooth," not "hard to the tooth." The standard of pasta cooking has become so perverted — through misuse of the word — that many cooks are now serving raw-tasting, gritty, undercooked pasta and calling it a virtue. It is not. A properly cooked pasta should offer tender, yielding resistance, not crunchiness. Cook your pasta until it is done.

When I told Gudrun I wanted to do a story about the bacaro phenomenon, "Oh, nooooo…" she cried. "There will be nothing left in Venice we can keep to ourselves!" The bacaro — with its tiny glasses of local wine called ombra, its bite-sized snacks called cicheti, its standing room and its sociable noise — is one of the few places left where Venetians can still feel that the city is their own. The cicheti range from a simple bruschetta to small portions of baccalà mantecato, sardines in saor, and meatballs — everything savory, everything good, everything gone in two bites.

The interview captures perfectly Marcella's directness, her wit, and the remarkable story of how she arrived in New York knowing almost nothing about American cooking — and proceeded to teach America everything she knew about Italian cooking.

And so, although our backgrounds were religiously and culturally different, they shared a love of good, honest, simple food made from fresh ingredients — and a conviction that the table is where a family becomes a family. Out of that intersection of Romagna, the Middle East, and Venice came the food we ate together for fifty years, and the food I have spent my life writing about and teaching.

One of the things that bothers me about the language surrounding the kind of cooking Ferran pioneered is how heavily it depends on the vocabulary of other disciplines — art, architecture, music, theater. Cooking that must borrow its language from other fields is cooking that has lost confidence in itself. The vocabulary of real cooking is food: freshness, flavor, season, simplicity, texture, heat, and the pleasure of eating something good. That vocabulary requires no translation.

Language and cooking — home cooking, that is — are vehicles for consciousness, the thing that makes us human. Cooking, like language, is most expressive of our identity when it is associated with a place, when it is grounded in a past and can expect a future. When cooking is "reinvented," it comes from nowhere and has nowhere to go — it exists only in that moment, no more than an amusement.

I love to eat well. I love the satisfaction of a dish that tastes exactly as a dish should taste — as it has always tasted and will always taste when made with good ingredients and honest technique. That continuity is not a limitation; it is the point. It connects us to the people who made it before us and to the people who will make it after us.

The seasonal produce that growers bring to their stalls is harvested in the outlying islands of the lagoon, above all in Sant'Erasmo, whose black-tipped artichokes — castraure — are among the most delicious things you will ever eat. The fishmongers' stalls display the Adriatic's finest catch each morning: spider crabs that are the basis of Venice's most celebrated pasta sauce, tiny soft-shell crabs called moeche, and the grey shrimp — schie — eaten whole with white polenta.

Rita is the best argument I know for the proposition that a restaurant's soul is the cook's soul. She cooks as Sardinian women have cooked for generations, with the kind of certainty that comes from having grown up doing it. There is no pretension in this room and none in the food. It is exactly what it is, no more and no less — and that is why it is so good.

Unfortunately they are no longer to be found in a store's fruit bin. Decades of breeding for durability in shipping have robbed the peach of the very quality that makes it worth eating: ripeness. A peach that can survive being picked green, packed, shipped, and stacked on a shelf for two weeks cannot taste like a peach. What you are eating is a memory of a peach — a very distant memory. If you find a real one at a farmers' market, buy many. They will not keep, and neither will the season.

We had our first taste of Sardinia some years ago at the Rialto food market in Venice, and it had the quality of revelation. Daniela, whose vegetable stall is our favorite, offered each of us a small, round, deep red tomato. "These are from Sardinia," she said. "Pop one into your mouth as though it were a cherry."

To say it tasted more of tomato than any other one we had ever had would be correct, but it falls short of describing the explosive concentration of sweetness and sharp tang that burst from it. We came back three more times that morning to eat more of the tomatoes. We made a note to ourselves: Sardinia has extraordinary food.

The recipe is in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. Start the meat in cold water, bring slowly to a boil, skim the foam, add the aromatics — a carrot, a celery stalk, half an onion, a few peppercorns — then simmer, never boil, until the meat is utterly, blissfully tender. Serve with salsa verde. It may be the most satisfying dinner I know.

Or, for a cheaper alternative, stay home and cook your way through Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, then travel to Italy. Good luck. — Marcella

It's a peculiar feeling, similar perhaps to those of a mother whose little boy has become a movie star: pride, wonder, and a touch of disbelief. I wrote that book in a state of great necessity, both financial and intellectual. I had something urgent to say, and I said it with the only craft I know. I never expected it to last. I am glad, and surprised, and grateful that it has.