Since I was I child I have been around good food. My parents, refusing to raise a picky eater fed me all the same food that they ate since I could chew. They had both supported themselves working in restaurants throughout their twenties, and that plus my fathers ardent love for cooking meant that I grew up on a wide variety of flavors ranging from thyme and lamb in the winter to Spanish tomato-watermelon gespacho in the summertime. One of the main sources of these flavors was my father’s copy of Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cookbook gifted to him by a friend living in Italy at the time. This well loved book has been around for as long as I can remember and has sourced some of my favorite childhood foods from it’s pages.
You can tell just by looking at it that this book has spent many hours in the kitchen, it is bookmarked and dogeared, grease stained at the edges with the occasional spot of tomato sauce. On some recipes, you can see that my father has written things to himself, adjusting measurements and taking notes in his messy script. The cover is peeling and tearing at the edges. This is not a book that has been used with a delicate hand, it is instead just as much a tool in the kitchen as a pot or pan, and puts in just as much work. I love to look through the pages and see which ones are particularly stained or beat up, to me it is just as much of an indication of what the dish will be like as the description at the top of the page; the recipe for chicken liver sauce boasting a large red dollop towards the top of the page, the recipe for my sister’s favorite bean soup carrying along with it my father’s notes for her preferred beans. It is somewhat of a family history, cataloguing my families changing tastes throughout the years.
As time rolled on this book became less of a staple in the kitchen. Eating and cooking habits changed and it is no longer the tool it once was. By the time I started cooking, it had been cycled out of the kitchen and onto the bookshelf so I never had the opportunity to learn from it the same way my father did. Now looking through it at the start of my twenties, I feel as though I stand in the same place as him. I know that this somewhat mythical book has just as much to teach me as it taught him, and I am ready to learn.
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