Hazan often introduces her recipes with brief, evocative notes about their origins and flavor profiles. Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is part visceral travelog, part lyrical field guide: both for cooking and for generating warmth and sensuality at home. Across each edition, elegant simplicity reigns. The cover of the 30th anniversary edition eliminates the bowl design, instead featuring colorful drawings of Hazan’s favorite ingredients-an onion, garlic, herbs, a tomato. Maroon lettering overlays the image, echoing the maroon lettering inside that introduces the title of each recipe. The light green and yellow cover of my older edition features a crosshatched bowl with a floral, embossed design. So I bought a series of cookbooks, which nourished my burgeoning culinary education, transported me to new places, and fueled my long standing habit of buying printed matter to mitigate uncomfortable feelings (as far as coping mechanisms go, not the worst).Įven the cookbook’s layout offers a sense of comfort. But interesting ingredients were hard to come by in this small, Western college town, and I pined for New York’s vibrant culinary scene and for my days roaming the world as an itinerant art writer. Missoula, where I landed in August 2020, offered mountains, fresh air, and a new community. Within months, cooking had become the most stable element in my chaotic life. Meanwhile, I prepared for a major move to Missoula, Montana, where I planned to attend graduate school. We broke up, I moved back into my apartment, cooked for one. I moved in with a partner, cooked for two. Along with so many others, I began cooking, trying to find lightness and some semblance of control as uncertainty, loss, and fears of illness dominated life in lockdown. My attitude changed once restaurants closed and grocery trips began to feel treacherous. So many other demands on my time-getting drinks with friends and colleagues, attending work-related events, going on dates-felt more important than spending hours in my windowless, cockroach nest of a Brooklyn kitchen, making food that probably wouldn’t be as good as whatever I could purchase just down the street.
0 kommentar(er)
