Second Rule of Cooking Club

If it looks wrong, go with your gut.

Our second cooking club dinner was last night. The theme was Italian, using recipes from the cookbooks of celebrity chef Mario Batali. Ditalini and I were in charge of the antipasto; Magret de Canard, our host, prepared the main dish; Manzo & Anitra Spezzatino brought the salad; Tiburón & Camarón Ceviche prepared a vegetable side dish. Houskový Knedlík was in charge of dessert but couldn’t come, so we raided Magret’s stash of gelato.

It was a terrific dinner. By the time I remembered to take a photo of our antipasto tray there was nothing left, but I did manage to get shots of the other dishes before they disappeared:

Yes, I know my food photography wasn’t the best last night, but at least this gives you the idea.

Dinner was molto Italiano, not just the food but the company and conversation: we talked and talked and talked some more and didn’t get up from the table for at least two hours. It was a great success … except for the Ceviches’ Concia de Zucchine, or marinated zucchini … which wasn’t their fault. It was Mario Batali himself who ruined that dish!

The recipe for Concia de Zucchini (which you can see on the left side of my plate in the fourth photo, above) comes from a Mario Batali cookbook titled Molto Italiano, and appears on page 447. The zucchini is sliced thinly, made crispy by frying, then marinated and served at room temperature. The marinade, according to Batali’s recipe (and at least four of us looked at it afterward to verify the amounts and ingredients), is made with minced garlic, two teaspoons of red pepper flakes, a cup of fresh basil, two tablespoons of kosher salt, two tablespoons of ground black pepper, and a quarter cup of red wine vinegar.

Two tablespoons of salt? You could brine a 20-pound turkey with that much salt! Even if the recipe mistakenly called for tablespoons instead of teaspoons, that still would have been way way too much salt.

Tiburón thought the measurements were way off when he prepared the dish, but decided to trust the famous chef (like, how many of us have multiple cookbooks in print, never mind our own TV shows?). He worried about it all the way over to Magret’s, and told us repeatedly beforehand he thought it would be too salty to eat. Sure enough, it was.

Something in Batali’s recipe is wrong, and it’s not just the salt … the red and black pepper are way out of proportion too. Afterward Tiburón said he should have gone with his gut.

Hence the Second Rule of Cooking Club: If it looks wrong, go with your gut.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen gross errors in cookbooks … including Julia Child’s classic Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which omits an important step in preparing her famous Boeuf Bourguignon recipe.

Well, live and learn. I probably would have trusted Mario Batali’s recipe too. Gee, I wonder if he’ll confiscate our tips if we point out the error on his Facebook page?