Several years ago, my spouse went to Rome for a year of teaching in a study abroad program. He’s done this a couple of times, and it is a wonderful experience for us both: he gets to live in Rome for a year, I get to take trips to Italy to visit. How great is that!?
This last time, I made a small cookbook for him, in case he wanted to make some of our favorite dishes while he was there without me cooking every night.
When he came back, we had a conversation in the kitchen one night as I was making our all-time favorite comfort dish, pasta amatriciana, for dinner:
Spouse: Mine didn’t come out the way yours does, when I cooked it in Rome
Me: Oh, OK. Well, watch me and let’s see if we can figure out what happened
Spouse (watching me cook the guanciale and onions for way longer than he expected) Wow, that’s a long time to cook them
Me: You have to cook them til they’re done
Spouse: How do you know when that is?
Me: Everybody knows that
Spouse (giving me The Look)….
Me: Oh. Well, that means the onions have to be soft but not colored, and the guanciale has to render its fat out.
[cooking continues for some minutes]
Spouse: OK… Wait, what is that butter doing there at the end?
Me: A pat of butter makes your sauces shiny and gives you that rounded mouthfeel you want
Spouse: Not in the recipe
Me: …Everybody knows…
Spouse (again, The Look)….
Me: I will rewrite the recipe
—[Scene]—
Every culture has a different way of writing cook books and recipes. In the US, recipes are very much like science experiments, with precise measurements and very explicit, step-by-step instructions. I have several older Italian cookbooks, and some of them include no amounts for the ingredients, and instructions like “ cook the onions until they are done,” because theses cook books come from a different set of assumptions about how we all learn to cook, and what skills and knowledge we bring into the kitchen when we open the cook book to make a meal.
Italian cook books assume the reader has a pretty high level of basic knowledge about the kitchen and how to cook, so the guidance in the cook books is more impressionistic. If you were not trained by your mother, grandmother, and aunts and neighbors, then you are not ready to use the book – as I discovered when I first tried to cook from these books. I had basic skills and two years as a line cook in fast food burger joints, but I did not have anything like the repertoire of a starting Italian cook at all.
Two of my favorite Italian cookbooks give insight into this in really complementary ways. Marcella Hazan – Santa Marcella in my kitchen – and the combo of Oretta Zanini da Vita and Maureen Fant tell us how to manage this. The first time you use a recipe, read it through closely and follow it as exactly as you can. Once you have figured out how it is “supposed” to taste, cook it your way. Does it have too much garlic, or not enough, for your taste? Is it thicker than you like, or not thick enough? Make it your own. And remember – most traditional recipes get cooked differently in every family’s kitchen, and every single version is equally traditional.
Over the years I have become more like an Italian cook than any other kind. I do not treat recipes as sacrosanct, scientific texts that must be followed without deviation. Recipes are great starting points to your own cooking journey. Read them, try them out, then adjust them to fit your style, your kitchen, and what you love. The way I write the recipes I will share here comes from this approach – research, practice, and adapt to make them my own. So do it your way and enjoy your food.
Fast forward thirty or so years – Reader, I have that knowledge now, through tons of cooking and reading lots and lots of cook books, and watching way too much food TV….
And it turns out that I do things in recipes that are not written there because EVERYBODY KNOWS that’s how you do it. Except that everybody doesn’t….
So I rewrote that recipe and added in the steps I just did as I cooked it over the years. And I changed it to include a great tip Spouse learned while he was in Italy, from one of his wonderful Roman coworkers – and since amatriciana is one of Rome’s four signature sauces, I was happy to learn from a master.