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• by:
• Hazan, Marcella

Marcella Hazan brings to the American home kitchen all the fresh, pungent flavors and earthy fragrances of good Italian family cooking. Translating her native cuisine with the same exactness of instruction and exuberance of description that have made her books so enormously popular across the country, she gives us 250 carefully selected new recipes that are among the most exciting she has ever created. In this, her most personal book, she shares as well fascinating vignettes about the evolution of a recipe, the initial inspiration, the ways she arrives at certain harmonies of flavors.

Reflecting the new trend toward lightness and freshness, there is a strong emphasis on soups, pasta, risotti, and unusual vegetable combinations—many a dish, although served as a first course in Italy, is satisfying enough to make a meal-in-itself for Americans today. There are particularly flavorful fish, chicken, and veal recipes, and dishes that use some chic "nouvelle" ingredients now more readily available in the United States, such as radicchio, sweet yellow peppers, dried porcini mushrooms, and the occasional treat of fresh white truffles. Vine-ripened tomatoes, once again abundant in farmers' markets, are used with proper light Italian touch, and you don't have to travel to Italy to taste its famous gelati—Marcella has unlocked the secrets of those incomparable ice creams and sorbets, and you can prepare them at home in a simple ice cream maker.

Here is Italian home cooking at its best—cooking that Marcella describes as "spontaneous, pithy, spirited, direct." It is seemingly simple cooking, which is all the more reason why the success of every dish depends on your ability to recapture its authentic, idiomatic flavor. And for that you need Marcella at your side—inspiring you, instructing you, explaining methods, clarifying principles, and, above all, celebrating with you the kinds of meals she loves: "simple food that has only one objective: to taste good."