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Crisis of faith
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Then there is that volume, the one streaked with pepperonata sauce, its pages mangled and steamed into perpetual ripples from everyday use until it's almost twice as thick as it was on the day you first opened it. Most cooks have a book like this, a faithful friend that has carried them through everything from dinner parties to seduction suppers to pasta meals whipped up for solitary delectation at the end of a long day. These books are our Virgils, our Obi-Wan Kenobis of the kitchen. They teach us, gradually, to trust ourselves with a skillet and maybe even a potato ricer. They've made cooks out of us, and we celebrate them here.

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Marcella's Italian Kitchen
By Marcella Hazan
Knopf, 276 pages

Who wouldn't be a little bit intimidated by Marcella Hazan's revulsion at "the pallor of deep-freeze counters, those cemeteries of food, whose produce is sealed up in waxed boxes marked, like some tombstones, with photographs of the departed"? By her dismay at the "undiscriminating condemnation" of that "vital substance," salt? ("When I try something new, even after I have seasoned it to my satisfaction, I sprinkle a touch more salt on a separate biteful.") By her wholesale rejection of cold pasta? ("If I had invented pasta salads I would hide.") By the exuberance of her disdain for innocent cinnamon? ("I loathe cinnamon, so the less said about that the better.")

For more than 25 years now Marcella Hazan has been goading, browbeating, hectoring, shaming and, not incidentally, inspiring her readers into preparing Italian cuisine the proper way, which is to say, according to the traditional methods of the Italian kitchen. I use all five of her books all the time, but my favorite is her third, "Marcella's Italian Kitchen," in which she starts to break away from the wrist-slapping classicism of her groundbreaking early volumes, "The Classic Italian Cook Book" and "More Classic Italian Cooking," and lets her imagination play a little.

The result is such inspirations as her shells with green, red and yellow peppers and cream (the sweetness of the peppers, the sweetness of the cream); her sautéed veal chops with mushrooms and white wine (the fresh button mushrooms taking on the funkiness of the dried porcinis); and, on an uncharacteristically weird note, her tonnarelli with cantaloupe (I wouldn't believe it, either, if I hadn't served it more than once to incredulous guests). Her eggless fig ice cream -- just figs, sugar, milk and water, processed and then frozen -- says all the good things there are to say about the late summer.

Marcella Hazan's impatient and judgmental tone often makes her seem like a pain. (She is one hero I've never wanted to meet.) But her recipes are so beautiful and so reliable and, most of the time, so brilliantly simple that what can you do but venerate her and love her in spite of herself?

-- Craig Seligman

Buy "Marcella's Italian Kitchen" at B&N.com

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