Last night we made one of our winter favorites for dinner, Marcella Hazan’s Chicken Fricassee with Red Cabbage.
We like this dish so much that our paperback copy of More Classic Italian Cooking has its spine broken at page 292, right at Pollo in Umido col Cavolo Nero.
Before taking out the ratty old paperback, Martha pulled out our hardcover copy of Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, planning on checking that rehash of previous books for the recipe. Boy, had it changed.
You see, the original recipe was delicious. It made a simple, one pot meal. The chicken emerged from its cabbage blanket an odd and ugly color. Purple may indicate royalty, but chickens do not take to it well.
It’s like other Italian food, especially the winter dishes. If you’ve had risotto with sausage, you know what I mean. Nothing comes closer to looking like a bowl of dog food than risotto with sausage. You can dust it with cheese and parsley, but it will still look like dog food with a dusting of cheese and parsley. But, oh my! How good it tastes!
So ugly never bothered us. When Martha took the leftovers to work, she delighted in hearing her coworkers exclaim, “Geez, what happened to your chicken?”
Anyway, we checked the newer recipe. The dish, instead of everything cooking together snug as a bug in a rug, the whole deal was disjointed, like the chicken. You cooked the cabbage separately. Then you browned the chicken in a different pan, something you didn’t do in the old recipe. Finally, you let the cabbage meet the chicken. For a while.
Wow. It seems to me that Italian food is about the melding of simple, wholesome flavors. Isn’t that what twirling the spaghetti in its sauce is all about? It seems that Marcella had made a conscious effort, 20 years later, to maybe “Frenchify” the dish a little. Then I read more from Essentials, and learned that reducing fat was a stated goal of the book. So, now the browned chicken doesn’t meet the cabbage until the end. Sad. Their lives as sustenance could have been so much more meaningful and delicious. And how much fat (flavorful chicken fat) really is saved by sauteing it?
So we made it the old way. We saved a pot. We saved every last bit of flavor of the chicken to enjoy. It gave its life for us, the least we could do was derive pleasure from its sacrifice.
And it’s butt ugly, isn’t it? Just like good taste suggests it’s supposed to be.