Thoughts on the Interpretation of Italian Recipes

In the individualistic and imaginative world of Italian cooking, the metric system always strikes me as discordant. It sounds so precise and scientific. Our antiquated American system of measurement, with its fractions and its dashes and pinches, seems better suited to the freewheeling Italian cook who measures by look and feel, experience and instinct. In most of the recipes in this book, I have rounded the English equivalent of the original metric measurement to something credible and manageable and have tried to render the metric equivalent equally friendly, without straying too far from what the author wrote. Both sets of measurements are to be taken as meaning “about what you would use if (ha ha) you actually measured.” The amount and direction of rounding may vary from ingredient to ingredient and recipe to recipe: these are traditional recipes, not conversion tables. Measurements for baking are held to a higher standard, of course, and here the metric original has been respected or altered only with the author’s permission. And speaking of the author, no amount of asking, badgering, or cajoling has had any effect on Oretta’s refusal, for most recipes, to give amounts of salt. Evidently, if we have to ask, we’re probably not ready to be alone in the kitchen. In any case, she cannot possibly know how salty our particular capers (or whatever) will taste and thus declines to offer an opinion when we can perfectly well taste the dish for ourselves.