Episode 71: Tomato, Cucumber, Red Onion Salad and Marcella’s Italian Kitchen
Cocktail hour - what’s on our minds?
We’re doing something a little new and a little chef questy and we’re very excited about it!
We’ve been wanting to do a cookbook read-through for a while now and couldnt exactly figure out what that would look like - do we do it just for patreon? How are we going to find time when we already have none?
So, we decided that we both really love Marcella Hazan (go listen to our ravioli repisode right now) and her recipes and general approach to cooking. We both got a copy of her Marcella’s Italian Kitchen and we are going to read it and enjoy it all together with each other and our Gluttoneers.
We’re going to kick it off with reading some of the intro, then we’re going to jump into salads because we are americans and we dont eat salads after our main course, and then we’re going to make a super simple salad of red onion, cucumber, fresh tomato, and basil, and finally, we will read some of the salad recipes until our throats give out.
Bio -Marcella! MARCELLA
Marcella was born in 1924 in the town of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna.
When Marcella Hazan was seven years old, she fell on the beach and broke her right arm. It was 1931, and she and her family were living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. At the hospital, her arm was placed in a cast that stretched from her shoulder to the tips of her knuckles. The pain didn’t subside after a few days, though, and the color of her hand began to dull. Her doctor removed the cast, revealing gangrenous skin that resembled the flesh of a rotting peach. Hazan needed multiple surgeries from an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital in the family’s native Italy, which forced them to move back to Cesenatico, the fishing town where Hazan (née Polini) was born. Her hand refused to fully straighten from that point forward, but—thank goodness—it functioned well enough to grip a knife.
For many years, Hazan’s experience in the kitchen was limited to menial chores. During the war, she would prepare gruel from mulberry leaves, water, and polenta flour to fatten up piglets for slaughter.
She pursued studies in biology and the natural sciences at the University of Ferrara, with plans to become a teacher.
It was only when she met her future husband, a quietly charismatic Italian-born man named Victor Hazan, in the early nineteen-fifties, that her culinary interests deepened. Food stimulated Victor, and he cooked often. Hazan, meanwhile, only knew how to make gruel for pigs.
“As my colleague Linda Wertheimer noted in a 2010 profile of Hazan, "When Marcella Hazan came to America, Parmesan cheese came in cans; we'd never met balsamic vinegar. Marcella also is known for bringing Roast chicken with lemon to american cooks - it was called the engagement chicken for a long time Hazan showed us that Italian cooking is simple, healthy and splendid."
She was actually a trained biologist and was a teacher in Italy who eventually opened her own cooking school.
She meets her husband and they move to America (he was born in Italy but raised in America) and he was like totally obsessed with food so she decided to learn how to cook and took a chinese cooking class and when the teacher had to leave before the end of the term - her classmates asked her to teach them how to cook Italian food and she did!
During her first days in America, Victor took Hazan to a café. Though he was a man with a sophisticated palate, he also knew how to enjoy America’s simple gustatory pleasures. When he poured ketchup over hamburger meat, she was appalled. She could not comprehend the American impulse to pollute a dish with such sweet sludge. American supermarkets likewise flummoxed her, with their produce and meats suffocating in plastic. The poor tomatoes were subjected to chemical malpractice in America—gassed, transported over a long distance, then hastened back to life like zombies. To Hazan’s shock, some foods were even frozen.
Recipe Source
Marcella’s Italian Kitchen
Ingredients
1 pound Slightly underripe Tomatoes
1 Cup Red Onion, Sliced
1 Cucumber
6-7 Basil leaves
¼ Yellow Bell pepper Optional
⅓ c extra virgin olive oil
2 T Red wine vinegar
Salt and Pepper
Steps
Put the sliced onion in a bowl with cold water to cover. Squeeze the onion gently in your hand but do not crush it - forcing some of its sharp acid out into the water. Let soak for 7-8 minutes, drain, and refill with fresh water. Repeat at least 4 times and the onion has soaked for at least 30 minutes. Then Drain and spin in a salad spinner or dry on a towel. Then add to the bowl you’ll use to toss the salad in.
Wash the tomatoes, skin them with a peeler, cut into ¼ inch wedges, remove any seeds in runny or gelatinous pulp and add the tomato in the bowl.
Wash and peel the cucumber, trim off the ends and cut it into very thin rounds, and add it to the bowl.
Wash Basil in cold running water, shake it as dry as you can, tear into small bits and add it to the bowl.
(OPTIONAL) Remove the core and seeds from the optional ¼ yellow pepper. Skin the pepper with a peeler as described on page 21 and cut it into very thin strips. Add to the bowl.
Dress the salad only when ready to serve it. Add the oil, salt, pepper and the vinegar - in that order to the bowl. Toss repeatedly to season all ingredients, Taste and correct seasonings. Serve with good crusty bread on the side.
How Marcella Hazan Became a Legend of Italian Cooking | The New Yorker