Ingredients

Marcella Hazan has left us one last treat, a survey of all the ingredients she has used in the cooking she has done.  (Ingredienti translated by her husband Victor for Scribners).  It is worth reading at this moment in time when most Americans have only a minimal connection with the foodstuffs that go in their mouths.  Between eating out in fast food joints and importing frozen prepared meals home from the supermarket, fewer people really know what cooking and preparing meals from scratch is all about.  This book is such a treat, even if it just for the reading.  Her chapter on herbs, everyone of them detailed in such a sensuous way for smell, for looks, for a projection of their life in a window box on a terrace.  You will rush out to get them all even if you are too otherwise occupied or too lazy to ever cook with them.  Of course, she is an advocate of these fresh vegetable markets springing up everywhere.  Her husband at the book signing I went to here in Sarasota described her horror at the first experience of a super market in the USA.  Instantly I thought of my mother and our first trek into an A & P which had appeared in our small Iowa town; it must have been in the late thirties or early forties. "Never again," she exclaimed as we left after touring the aisles.  Alas, poor thing, she was not to know that in ten years all the small greengrocers, bakeries, butchers, and all the rest would have surrendered to supermarkets.  I lived that first experience a second time in early seventies Rome with its delightful small shops everywhere at a time when they were just facing up to the arrival of the supermercati.  With four children  thoughts of leisurely cooking and cuisine had more or less disappeared except for my time in Rome.  My second wife, who had grown up shopping with her mother on military bases, was inoculated against the horror of food in bulk.  At first she did the cooking and so determined the shopping.  We had four children, she bought in bulk.  I remember in California buying day old bread sliced and in cellophane wrappers, good old white bread which we brought home in loads in our Volkswagen Microbus, and shoved into our freezer.  When she was desperate to get back to work I undertook the household management, but she, anxious to keep her oar in the water, insisted upon shopping, so the PX days of her memory took over, and she arrived home every Friday night with enough food to stock the army, and left me to cook it for the week.  The menus I proposed were  pretty basic, and teenagers are not very creative eaters although they can be ferociously picky.  Nowadays my husband has taken over most of the cooking, and, having grown up in a home where Dole canned fruit was what passed for fresh,  he loves BJ's and CostCo and I am too feeble and finally too indifferent to resist.  So, it is a delight to read Ingredienti and remember for a bit what it's really all about.  One of my sons is a chef, he once opened a very high end restaurant in London, and as they say he knows from great cuisine and fine ingredients. In London he was up at five to go over the days catch with the fishmongers, for God's sake! You want to keep your recipes simple enough that each ingredient lingers for a second on your tongue taste and texture--that was always Signora Hazan's advice.  Maybe I shall make a habit again of going to Saturday's fresh food market here in Sarasota, get out Hazan's book of classic Italian cooking, study Ingredienti and relive it all.  How delightful those years were!  Thank you, Marcella, for bringing the joy of cooking (sorry, Irma!) back to me.