2018 will in future be known as the year of the Great West Norwood Cookbook Cull. But which books to get rid of, and which to keep? The Random Recipe Adventure will help us decide (you can read a bit more about the premise here). Each week, a book will be taken from the shelves, examined, and cooked from. Losers go to Oxfam – winners stay on the shelves, with a promise that they will no longer be neglected quite as much as they have been for the last decade or so.
WEEK 14
The book
The Second Classic Italian Cookbook by Marcella Hazan
How/where/when did I get it?
Inherited from my mother’s shelves when she died.
Have I used it since then?
Not as much as its predecessor. What have I been thinking?
What Did The Random Recipe Generator throw up?
Rice with savoy cabbage. Inspired by the success of this, we then went on to cook pork chops braised with sage and tomatoes, and pancakes stuffed with tomatoes, prosciutto and cheese. Not all on the same day, I hasten to add.
So, what about it?
As the weeks go by, the prospects of relieving the shelves of the burden of unwanted cookbooks recede; but that isn’t the only aim of the Random Recipe Adventure. The idea is also to use these books, and in that department we are fulfilling the brief admirably.
This week’s examination ran to three highly successful dishes, from the unpromising-sounding but quite delicious ‘rice with cabbage’ (in fact with several more ingredients, the key ones being two cheeses: mozzarella, which gave the dish a pleasing gooeyness and parmesan to lend umami) to one I knew would be a winner in certain quarters from the moment I read out the word ‘pancakes’.
While my copy of this book’s predecessor, The Classic Italian Cookbook, is falling apart from overuse (as if there were any such thing!), this one remains inexplicably unexplored. The extent of my idiocy became clear as I worked my way through the book. I look forward to making up for lost time. Hazan’s arresting mixture of knowledge, wisdom, precision and imagination combine to make some of the most successful recipes (and enjoyable reading) I’ve encountered.
The Verdict: Keeper or Chucker?
Prise it from my cold dead grasp.
It is beginning to look like a hopeless situation with respect to culling!