an Italian menu of two balanced 'principal courses' followed by a salad and dessert. Although Hazan prefers the painstaking approach of both preparing food by hand rather than machine and cooking it on burners atop the stove rather than in the oven, her recipes can yet be simple, one of the most popular of them (by her own report) consisting simply of a chicken roasted with two lemons in its cavity. Her celebrated recipe for Italian tomato sauce is frequently cited by the cooking section of the New York Times. Among the techniques Hazan suggests are: Choose vegetables that are in season and plan the entire meal around them. Soak vegetables in cold water for half an hour before cooking to remove all trace of grit. Cook them until they are tender, but not mushy, so that they have a rich flavour. When sautéing onions, put them in a cold pan with oil and heat them gently; this will make them release their flavour gradually and give them a mellower taste than starting them in a hot pan. Although some types of pasta, like tagliatelle, are best made fresh at home, others, like spaghetti, should be bought dried. Pasta should be matched carefully to sauce. Olive oil isn't always the best choice for frying; in delicately flavoured dishes, a combination of butter and vegetable oil should be used. Garlic presses should be avoided at all costs. Hazan frequently prefaces her recipes with descriptions of how the food is eaten in Italy, or with her own memories of it. For example, her recipe for coffee ice with whipped cream, included in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, begins: Hazan has been credited with starting a craze for balsamic vinegar, something she later regretted because she thought people were overusing it. Craig Claiborne said of Hazan's work, "No one has ever done more to spread the gospel of pure Italian cookery in America". The food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, who once travelled to the Hazans' second home in Venice for a cooking lesson, predicted that Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking "will become the essential Italian cookbook for an entire generation". In a review of Marcella's Italian Kitchen for salon.com, Craig Seligman criticized Hazan's "impatient and judgmental tone", but added: "... her recipes are so beautiful and so reliable and, most of the time, so brilliantly simple that what can you do but venerate her