Her preference for economy extends to her dishes. The ingredients for her roast chicken comprise the yardbird, salt and pepper, plus two small lemons, full stop. Her most enduring recipe is a tomato sauce cooked with a halved onion and a generous amount of butter.

There is nothing ostentatious about Marcella Hazan’s recipes; things taste of what they are. She remained horrified by the American palate (see: ketchup on hamburger); her recipes are rarely drenched in heavy sauces or herbaceous frills. Her interpretation of Italian cooking must have been foreign to Americans used to the garlic-laden dishes at restaurants with red-checkerboard tablecloths and “That’s Amore!” playing on a loop.

I was most excited to try Hazan’s recipe for Pork Loin Braised in Milk, Bolognese Style (pg. 417). Here the required ingredients were butter, vegetable oil, pork rib roast, salt and pepper, and whole milk. Who could resist after reading her hype: “If among the tens of thousands of dishes that constitute the recorded repertory of Italian regional cooking, one were to choose just a handful that most clearly express the genius of the recipe, this one would be among them.... As [the pork and milk] slowly cook together, they are transformed: The pork acquires a delicacy of texture and flavor that lead some to mistake it for veal, and the milk disappears to be replaced by clusters of delicious, nut-brown sauce.”

The fatty hunk of pork sat in a lazy simmer of whole-fat milk. Slowly the milk turned a dark beige, coagulating into salty cheese curds that would eventually be spooned over softened pork slices and polenta. Three pounds of milk-braised pork lasted in our household for three days.

Image for article titled Cooking, finally, from the greatest Italian cookbook ever written
Photo: Kevin Pang

One night we made a variation of her famous tomato-butter sauce. The Tomato Sauce with Heavy Cream (pg. 155) is marginally more involved than the original—it uses a mirepoix of finely chopped onion, carrots, and celery, along with one-third cup of butter. (My suggestion is to sauté the mirepoix first, as the chopped vegetables did not soften in the sauce.) In this version, a half cup of heavy whipping cream is stirred in at the end, and the result was a safety-cone orange sauce registering level 11 on the richness scale.

Truth be told, I’ve made pasta sauces and Sunday gravies with greater depths of flavor. But Hazan’s recipes also didn’t involve wild goose chases through spice shops for a pinch of fennel pollen and marjoram. These are foundational recipes made with ingredients already in my—and your—pantry. It’s a relief to know you can, without stepping outside your house, create satisfying Italian food with minimal effort tonight.

The last dish we cooked from Essentials was A Farm Wife’s Fresh Pear Tart (pg. 589). As was the case with most of the dishes we chose that week, the decision to make it fell to her irresistible introduction: “This tender, fruity cake has been described as being so simple that only an active campaign of sabotage could ruin it.”

Image for article titled Cooking, finally, from the greatest Italian cookbook ever written
Photo: Kevin Pang

Mix together eggs, milk, sugar, salt, and flour, then pour the resulting thick cake batter over sliced pears in a round buttered tin lined with breadcrumbs. Then bake it for 50 minutes. That’s it. The tart shares a lineage with the classic French dessert clafoutis—lightly sweet, the warm and tender pears unyielding to the fork, lovely with afternoon tea.

As I write this in April 2020, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is an appropriate book for the times. I can crack it open to any page and most likely cook that recipe with what’s on hand. But there’s a greater benefit from this timeless cookbook for this moment: Hazan’s recipes seem to require more of your cooking gut, and as such, there’s greater buy-in needed from the home cook. Rarely have I felt a greater connection with a cookbook, and these days connecting to something—anything—is a welcome respite.