I'm camping out with my family at my father's house for the pandemic, which means more space, sure, but none of my cookbooks. This may seem like an insignificant thing to gripe about right now, but since I'm also cooking more than I ever have in my life—three meals a day plus snacks for a toddler—I've never needed my cookbooks more.
Not just for recipe ideas, but for a certain kind of companionship: The trusted voice of a person who has spent a lifetime in the kitchen, paring down recipes to their essentials and guiding me with a firm, even mildly dictatorial hand. A voice of confidence and certainty and clarity, all things that are lacking in my life right now. Marcella's lifetime output of published recipes is legendary. And while these recipes range from the surprisingly minimalist to the ambitious and uncompromising carta de musica , anyone?
From a tomato, onion, and butter sauce that breaks all sauce-making rules to her super-simple roast chicken, Marcella had an unsung knack for defying convention to get at the heart of flavor, so her easiest recipes taste no more and no less delicious than any of her most complicated ones.
NB: That means they are very, very delicious. The three recipes that follow are the ones I've been turning to again and again, but her books have countless more recipes that are equally rock-solid and stripped down. Marcella's famous Tomato Sauce with Butter and Onion has an unassuming recipe title that conceals its radical essence. One of the very first things everyone learns about making tomato sauce is that you start by sauteing chopped onion or garlic, usually in olive oil.
Here, there's no chopping, no sauteing—there isn't even any olive oil. You simply combine a can of tomatoes, a halved peeled onion, a couple pats of butter, and a bit of salt and pepper in a pot and set it to simmer for 45 minutes, until, as Marcella likes to say, "the oil floats free of the sauce. Marcella's sauce has saved my sanity at more dinnertimes than I can count, and feels even more necessary now that sanity is in short supply. You can toss this sauce with pasta and shower it with parm or another hard grating cheese and call it a day, or use it as a building block for stuffed shells remember stuffed shells?
Everyone knows how versatile tomato sauce is once you have some on hand—make a double batch and stash half in the freezer and you will most definitely use it. Her take on Roast Chicken with Lemons is iconic.
No need for pre-salting or brining. My wife and I stopped going to restaurants or ordering takeout every night of the week. I actually started having people over for dinner. I loved my own cooking. In , I was able to express my reverence for my teacher with this cartoon, which appeared in Gastronomica magazine:. Not long afterward, I received a letter from Marcella herself, asking me for permission to use the cartoon on the menu of her eightieth-birthday celebration in Verona, Italy.
A copy of the menu is framed on my studio wall. She and her husband, Victor, came to New York for the book party, and I finally had the chance to meet her. After a few minutes of awkward conversation, during which we were constantly being interrupted by various famous chefs and celebrities from the food world, I told in her in six different ways how much she had meant to me, and I was able to blurt out that my proudest moment in the kitchen had been when my wife and I worked together to recreate her very challenging torta di carciofi —artichoke-and-ricotta pie.
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