Cookbook Review: The Italian American Cookbook, by John Mariani

 

Jesse Sutton-  I've been aware of John Mariani for a number of years, but I've never read any of his writing.  He was a friend of the Woodlands, and was always a booster for Tarver King (to be fair, TK is the goddamned man), and my wife got his newsletter for a little while, but I never really bothered with his stuff.  Then, I was (as I do constantly) reading an old Saveur, and saw a review for his book The Italian American Cookbook, which intrigued me.  The review was favorable, IIRC, but dated.  The book came out in 2000, so obviously we are dealing with a different era for food publishing.  However, I love old cookbooks, and this wasn't even that old.  What excited me was the concept of Italian-American cuisine.  I have worked in my share of red-sauce joints, and I absolutely love Italian American food.  It's a cuisine entire of itself, and it's become fashionable to slag off the old dinosaur dishes like veal parmigiana and gigantic, 10-layer lasagne in favor of 'authentic' fare, like, I don't know, bagna cauda, vitello tonnato, that kind of stuff.  And there's not a a damn thing wrong with that, but what we need to remember is that all those old Dean Martin-ass dishes are awesome.  Like, you can get a great, authentic meal at a place like Babbo, or you can go to Rao's and get a veal cutlet the size of a dinner plate.  I LOVE restaurants that have pictures of Frank Sinatra and Tony Soprano on the walls.  

What I anticipated was a massive, scholarly tome, full of all the dishes that all the other cookbooks ignore, along with historical notes on their origins.  I was so excited.  I got a copy used on Amazon for just a few bucks, and read it cover to cover.  Did it deliver?  Well, kind of.

The Concept: On paper, a book on Italian American cuisine is a great idea, but Mariani, in my opinion, failed to really commit to the concept.  In a collection of 250 recipes, he gave historical information about the origins of the dish only 29 times.  That's 11.6%.  Come on, man.  (I'm not counting recipes he got out of books by, for instance, Todd English.  There were another dozen or so he cribbed from 'friends' of his.  I'm not a huge fan of when cookbook authors do this.  But it's a valid stylistic choice, I guess.)  But for the vast majority of recipes, there is nothing at all about origin.  Consider the Orecchiette with Sausage and Pesto.  What makes that Italian-American, and not just Italian?  I have no way to know, but then, I'm not the guy that just wrote a book on it.  You'd think that by reading the book, I'd have more answers.  But I don't.  I have 29.  The good news is, this just clears the way for Nate and I to write the book I wanted this to be, so I guess that's pretty cool.  If he'd have just called it John Mariani's Italian-American Kitchen, the title would have given me less false hope.  It sounds more personal and less authoritative, which would have been more honest.  Then again, I wouldn't have bought it, so there's that.

The Specs: 450 pages, 250 recipes, a lot of them good.  There are chapters covering every major category: antipasti, soups, salads, pasta, risotto/polenta, seafood, meats, poultry, vegetables, bread/pizza/sandwiches, desserts, and drinks.  There is also a pretty good discussion of Italian ingredients, and a really nice section on Italian wines.  They also include a wine pairing with each recipe, more on this later.

What's Good: A lot of the recipes, really.  The relative difficulty level of this book was low, compared to a lot of the stuff I read, and the ingredients were all readily available, so I cooked out of this book quite a bit.  A few duds, but some really great stuff as well.  I've outlined them all in detail below.

What Stinks: Quite a few things, really.  First off, there's the problem with the book not really realizing the potential of its concept, but enough about that.  Second, with books of this size, you are bound to have some editing issues.  For instance, some recipes call for pepperoncinis and refer to them being packed in oil.  Other times, they apparently mean the brined ones, little stuff like that.  The problem is exacerbated by the ingredient glossary lacking an entry for pepperoncinis.  I get it, 450 pages is a ton of content, but still.  In another instance, a quail dish calls for Sichuan peppercorns, but there's nothing in the flavor text explaining the inspiration for reaching for such an exotic ingredient, one almost never found in American OR Italian cuisine.  

The third big issue is the lack of recipes for basic pantry items.  It calls for fresh pasta sheets, but lacks a recipe for generic fresh pasta.  250 recipes, and you couldn't cover pasta dough?  Or in his recipe for St. Louis Toasted Raviolis, he calls for cheese raviolis, with no recipe for pasta or filling.  You want I should use Buitoni?  Especially asinine is a recipe for lobster raviolis in which he calls for goddamn wonton skins.  Come on, Johnny.

Lastly, the wine pairings are a little silly as well.  We tried a bunch, and they generally worked, but were rarely synergistic.  Putting a Valpolicella (rich, cocoa-scented big red)  with peppers stuff with salt cod was a damn weird choice.  Did you mean to write Vermentino (citrusy, saline, oceanic white)?  He paired Tigniatello (one of the big daddy Super Tuscans) with something, I don't remember what, but it's a little obnoxious to recommend a $180 bottle in a cookbook that calls for wonton skins and storebought ravs.  Who is this book for?  (I mean, Tig might not have been that much in 2000, but still.)  He recommended Chianti to go with buttered noodles.  Like, what dry wine wouldn't go with buttered noodles?  Most frustratingly, there are many wines recommended that he doesn't go over in the glossary.  Why?  What was the purpose of the glossary, if not to explain the wine pairings?  This would have been a 10-minute fix.  The book's attention to detail is frustratingly lacking.

Recipes Tested

Pizza Dough: Check out the Chicago-style pizza quest here.  No sense in going on about it here, it's been well-covered.

Peperoni con Bacalao: These are little roasted peppers, stuffed with a salt cod filling and dressed with a basil vinaigrette.  They were annoyingly fiddly to stuff, but absolutely delicious.  It was kind of my fault, too.  The book said to roast bell peppers, cut them in half and fill them, but they had these great little lunchbox peppers at the store, so I made my life a lot harder, but man, it made the photo better.

Green Salad with Pears and Gorgonzola: Nothing wrong with this salad, but nothing particularly special about it, either.  The greens-nuts-cheese-tree fruit-vinaigrette formula is ubiquitous to the point of being cliche.  Still, I appreciated how instead of just calling for mesclun, Mariani created a custom blend (Belgian endive, radicchio, and red leaf lettuce).  It was dressed in a super-simple dijon vinaigrette.  I say this salad was ordinary, but that's really not entirely fair.  I should note that this book came out in 2000, and this salad might have been relatively novel twenty years ago.  It's not Mariani's fault that every bistro, cafe, wine bar, and brasserie in the US put a salad that was a riff on this formula on their menu.  Nice salad, and maybe forward thinking, too.

Farfalle with Walnut Sauce: Man, I was excited about this one.  Farfalle is tossed in a sauce of ground walnuts, parmigiano, heavy cream, and parsley.  However, the recipe came out heavy, cloying, dense, and bland.  The sauce was just richness on top of richness.  My wife and I shook a little red wine vinegar over it, which improved it massively, but it was still pretty one-note.  If I had to do it again, I'd leave the cream out entirely, and flesh the sauce out with red wine vinegar, walnut oil, butter, and a little chicken stock.  I'd also leave some of the walnuts whole, to provide a little textural interest.  This was the worst dish of the bunch.

Pasta Fagiole: Now this is what I'm talking about.  This is one of those classic, dinosaur, Rat Pack, Louis Prima-type dishes I wanted to learn from this book.  I've seen it on menus but never ordered it.  White beans are braised in tomato sauce and chicken stock, goosed up with rosemary, garlic, onion, parm rind, and chile flake.  Then, into this savory and excellent stew, tiny pasta (I used farfellini) are folded in.  What a fantastic dish, and how violently Italian-American.  I could eat this every day.  The basil wasn't in the recipe, but the photo was a little monochrome, and we had basil on hand.

St. Louis Toasted Raviolis: Okay, as stated, I was a little disappointed with this recipe.  Toasted means fried, by the way, at least in St. Louis.  Man, I hate the Cardinals.  Anyway.  The book called for cheese raviolis, and said to have tomato sauce on hand.  So basically, the meat of this recipe was the frying method itself.  Okay, fine, so how are we frying these things?  I was a little perplexed by the method.  I mean, I've had fried ravs before, but never really thought about it.  Why would you bread ravioli?  Isn't ravioli famously already breaded?  The book had you dunk the ravs in condensed milk, and then roll them in breadcrumbs, fry them, and then shower them in finely grated parmigiano reggiano.  The results were absolutely fantastic.  The condensed milk made the breadcrumbs stick, and the breadcrumbs gave the cheese shreds something to grab on to.  Just delicious.  We tried frying an unbreaded ravioli as a control, and it wasn't the same.  Great recipe.  (For those interested, watch out for the upcoming podcast.  The tomato sauce I used was the excellent Marcella Hazan recipe that Nate championed.  Who knew the reason my tomato sauce wasn't that good is it wasn't like 20% butter?  The more you know...)  Please note that the photo omits the parmigiano, which is an extremely important component of this dish.  Our mistake.

Sauteed Baby Lamb Chops with Parmigiano Reggiano: Okay, these were just stupid.  Stupid awesome.  Lamb chops, seasoned with salt and pepper, then packed with microplaned parmigiano reggiano, before being egg-washed, rolled in breadcrumbs, and pan-fried.  They are then topped with dollops of tomatoes, sauteed into a compote with garlic and mint.  This dish was absolutely fantastic.  Everyone always takes such care to be delicate with lamb rack, because it's so damn expensive, but man, treating it like bar food works wonders.  My wife thought it was gilding the lily, but she is incorrect.

Chicken Vesuvio: I had to try this one, because I only became aware of it a few months ago.  I told my former roommate, noted Italian American Tom Deluca, about the book I was reading, and he said 'What does that even mean?  Hot dog Vesuvio?'  I didn't get it, so I looked up Vesuvio, and learned that it is a Chicago-Italian dish.  I explained to him that the dish was unknown in Italy, and we had a little cultural moment.  That exchange really shows the conceptual power of this concept for a book, however incompletely it's been realized by Mariani.  Diaspora cuisine takes on a life of its own, and as a result, a native Italian and a first-generation American can have totally different perspectives.  The dish itself is nothing more than roasted chicken and potatoes, in a gravy flavored with white wine, garlic, and rosemary, studded with peas.  The recipe was clunky and hard to follow.  I wish they could have just said 'roast a chicken, make this here gravy, and serve it with peas and roasted potatoes,' it would have saved me some hassle.  Cookbook authors take note: sometimes you can really save yourself and your readers some hassle by frankly stating what the dish is in the beginning.  Instead, this had me going around my ass to get to my elbow.  Also, the sauce was a little thin, so I tightened it up with some Wondra.

Torrone Semifredo:  What's torrone, you ask?  Crappy little almond nougat candies.  This dish takes said crappy little candy and dices it, before folding it into a mousse made by folding whipped cream into a liquor-scented zabaglione, and then freezes the whole thing solid.  Now, I didn't love the dessert.  Perhaps my torrone was not fresh.  As candies go, I put it below Jolly Ranchers, but well ahead of Runts (for my money, the single worst candy in existence).  About on par with Smarties, or Necco Wafers.  Not that it tasted like that, I'm just giving perspective to it's crappiness.  I had to mail order it off Amazon, and it seemed awfully dried out.  However, the semifreddo technique was really easy, and has definite potential!  What else can we fold through a frozen mousse?  How about a mixture of candied citron peel and Froot Loops?  How about diced oreos, and then make the liqueur Rumplemintz?  If I am going to incorporate this into my repertoire, I will invest in a decent silicon mold.  It would have looked better, and been less trouble.  Every chef needs an easy, stable dessert, in case they get called on to do a private dinner and don't have a pastry elf along, and this technique is one I WILL be going back to.

The Verdict: I'm of two minds, here.  I want to hate on this book for failing to realize its potential, except that potential was mostly in my head.  That's okay, John Mariani's missed opportunity just became my opportunity.  One day I'll write the book this could have been.  In the meantime, we have a book with a few editing problems, but also, a really great array of fun, not-too-hard recipes.  I'll give it a 3.5/5, with the caveat that I am factoring how you can get a copy of this book used, right now, on Amazon, for $1.60 (+$3.99 S&H).  This book is well, well worth six bucks.  Of limited interest to a professional, but a beginner or a home cook could really find a lot to love here.

Bonus Round- House Made Ricotta: The book also has a method for making ricotta, which I thought I'd try.  It called for milk to be steeped with live-culture buttermilk or sour cream, simmered, and drained.  The thing is, I couldn't find ANY good info on whether regular grocery store buttermilk has live culture to it.  Nothing.  Anywhere.  I ended up getting some sour cream, some buttermilk, and the only product at Whole Foods that actually proclaimed live culture, a mysterious jarred product called White Mountain Probiotic Bulgarian Yogurt, which sounds like something a luddite hippie would use to treat a yeast infection.  I made three batches, to compare results.  The results were interesting.  The buttermilk (the least acidic of the three) had a poor yield, and the resulting whey was very white, looking almost like skim milk.  The next most acidic, the sour cream, had a substantially larger yield, and a much lighter whey, so it clearly catalyzed  more of the protein.  The hippie yogurt, however, was the clear winner.  Its yield was 20% higher than the sour cream, and like 40% higher than the buttermilk.  The whey was yellowing and translucent, really stripped of protein.  So more acid means better yield.  Good to know

The three cheeses, disappointingly, tasted identical, and more disappointingly, weren't nearly as good as just regular store ricotta, like Polly-O or something.  Much, much dryer, and blander (although I could easily have salted the curds).  They made a perfectly good cheese ravioli filling (what with me adding eggs, parmigiano, and salt), but weren't good enough to serve on their own.  It was certainly not worth the extra time, mess, and hassle, except as an educational opportunity.  The two circumstances under which I'm willing to try it again are if I can get ahold of some really badass special milk from a local dairy, or if I plan on making ricotta gnochhi.  The reason for this is that to make gnocchi, you really need to hang ricotta for a while, to dry it out, but this recipe yields completely dry ricotta, so it would actually be less trouble.  (It's really, really hard to make a good hanging rig that fits in a home refrigerator.)

-JS