The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking

"I like this book for exactly the opposite reasons that I like Elizabeth David. It’s not beautiful writing; I don’t read her for information; I don’t read her for a sense of place. I read Marcella Hazan purely for the way she writes her recipes. I think she’s a little humourless, and the tone is quite matriarchal. But there is no finer recipe writer. Her recipes are concise, they’re clear, they’re unfussy and she never leaves me in any doubt about what I’m supposed to be doing. I would have thought this is the perfect book for somebody who actually doesn’t know how to cook. She never patronises you, she never assumes you know anything much about practical cooking, and she guides you effortlessly through a recipe. And although there’s a strictness there that I bridle against, it’s an absolute gem of perfect recipe writing. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I think it’s quite authentic. She has spent a lot of time in America, an awful lot. But I feel it’s authentic, and certainly I know Italians who give her the thumbs-up and say it’s authentic. Well, actually no, because my recipes tend to be very chatty and informal, and my recipes, well, they are a bit vague sometimes, whereas Marcella’s are anything but."

"Marcella Hazan really is a teacher. When people come to work at the River Café as a chef we ask them if they have read this, and if they haven’t we ask them to read it. She is a very disciplined and thorough chef. She takes you through each step and really cares about the way you go through a dish. She doesn’t talk too much about only using a certain tomato in the summer or only serving a certain dish in the winter. She’s not that seasonal but she really cares about the ingredients. I also love the drawings in this book. She’ll tell you how to prepare an artichoke or how to roll out the pasta dough using illustrations. She revolutionised Italian cooking for a very wide audience. You don’t want to judge Marcella on whether she did or she didn’t. Just look at her body of work, it’s extraordinary. If you were going to gift books to someone who wanted to start cooking Italian food, they would get a very good grounding with Marcella Hazan and Elizabeth David."

"This is also Judith Jones. She has a sense of what a cookbook should be and I’ve really learnt from her. Again, Marcella Hazan takes you by the hand. For example, if you are going to make a risotto she tells you what rice to buy. Not just one, but several, two or three. She’ll tell you what kind of temperature you should cook at, how much liquid you need, all the possibilities. Which risotto is supposed to be wetter. A pea risotto, made in early spring, is in a particular style of Venice . “You do need to marinate it, but not for long. A couple of hours is enough.” Yes. Soupy. People don’t always know that risotto can vary according to what the style is, etc. So, people always make it gummy but this is a soupy one. It is written so well, so beautifully, that you want to read the text and see how things arrive at being what they are. It is the best Italian cookbook I know of. I make a lot of things from it, including an osso bucco, the risottos, home-made pasta, ravioli. She leads you through the whole range."