Tom Valenti is a lot like me. We both hail from working-class Italian-American families. We both loved sports growing up (and still do). We both live happy lives cooking for the greatest customers in the world in New York City. We both love to fish and we both love to take naps. We both love to cook at our restaurants and at our homes. We both love big gutsy flavors and layers and layers of them in every dish we create. We both would prefer to be known for our grandma style of cooking than for anything “cutting-edge.” We both represent the Italian ideal of hospitality and live for our love of the table and the time spent there with friends and family. We both understand the value of food as substance more than just something to eat. We both work with excellent charities outside of our restaurants and feel great about that.
. . . And we both hate doing the dishes.
This new book attacks the dishes issue head on. I find it deplorable that at the end of every great meal there is the equivalent of a prison sentence of an hour or more of cleanup for some unlucky soul. At our restaurants, we both have teams of people near us at all times to wipe up our every spill, to polish our fancy wine glasses, and to buff the silver. At home we have only ourselves.
The reality of cooking at home is not only that of the cleanup, it is also an issue of our most precious commodity: free time. Really great food does not have to take all day to prepare. Although they may need to simmer on the back burner for several hours on low heat, many of my favorite dishes take literally thirty minutes of real effort to get going. What that leaves is twofold: a great dish filled with exquisite and complex layers of poetic flavor and the ethereal texture of the best of grandma’s cooking and the reality of a clean kitchen at dinnertime with but one pot and some plates to clean.
It’s not that cleanup is such a crucial issue, because in fact I can always cajole someone into doing the dishes in exchange for dinner. It is more a matter of quality of life. The foods that come out of a single pot reflect the love of sharing and a time for family and the feelings of goodness that surround and envelop a table of people breaking bread in a near sacred hymn of ritual and simplicity. Conversely, it speaks to the modern family on the go, where dinners are often reheated three or four times a night, for each lone ship passing through the kitchen for just enough time to refuel. In this case a simmering pot of something great is a guarantee of higher quality food, even if quality time is less of a priority than it could be.
It may seem like slumming for one of New York City’s greatest chefs to take on the Crock Pot, unless you really look at the menus in his instantly hot two restaurants, Ouest and ’Cesca. Deep behind the menu-speak describing the modern American and Italian ingredients in his timeless dishes, there lurks the real truth about Tom Valenti’s cooking: each item is either cooked two minutes or two hours. The two-hour items are what make Tom’s and my cooking so similar and so tasty, the two-minute items are what allow our restaurants to thrive. To understand that these two strategies can and should go together is critical in developing a strategy for cooking at home. Some things will take some time to cook into a potful of poetry. Other things take just a couple of minutes of prep to get ready. This is good. And there are some things, like a perfect plum or deliciously al dente spaghetti with oil and garlic, that are all about the shopping and not at all about the cook. In Tom’s and my world, putting them all together makes for great food, and it should in yours.
So use this book with the same sense of humor and fun that Tom and I put into our daily adventures in cooking, buy the freshest ingredients you can find, use the recipes as road maps as opposed to exact surgical diagrams, and relax. There won’t even be too much cleanup. Then you can eat just like Tom and I.
—Mario Batali