Tag Archives: Italian cooking

On Marcella Hazan

Marcella Hazan died a couple of days ago.

 

This is horrible news and it saddens me greatly.

 

A lot of you probably don’t know who she is.  That’s ok – here are a few things to bring you up to speed:

 

1 – she’s the Italian version of Julia Child, bringing authentic Italian food to America in the 50s onwards.  (Don’t know Julia Child?  Watch the movie “Julie and Julia”.  Right now.  Come back here when you’ve done that.  Go on, shoo!)

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Going Umami For Food

The current buzz-word in high-end food circles these days is “Umami”.  It’s a Japanese-coined word based on “Umai”, meaning “tasty” (although as a kid I’d say “Umeh”, which is the slang version of “Umai”…most men would also say “Umeh” as well…as a girl or lady, I’d actually say “Oh-iishii”, which means delicious/tastes good).

On Wikipedia it is described as the 5th category of taste: a sort of savoury taste that is very satisfying to the taste-buds, the special something that gives food a particular depth of flavour:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umami

I like to think of it in a similar way to a great perfume. You have top/head notes, middle/heart notes and bottom/base notes in a great perfume:

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