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Many Italian dishes begin by slowly sautéing chopped onion, often with celery and carrot, in olive oil or butter until the onion softens and turns pale gold, before any other ingredient goes in. This base sets how deep and sweet the finished dish tastes, so rushing or browning it too hard changes everything built on top of it. The cooking process is ordered in layers, and each later step depends on how well the earlier one was done.
The book argues that there is no single 'Italian food': the real units are regional kitchens shaped by local fats (butter in the north, olive oil in the south), local produce and local habits. The red-sauce Italian-American restaurant menu is a flattening export, not the original. Cooking authentically means cooking a specific place's food, not a generic national style.
An Italian meal is built as a series of separate courses, such as primo (pasta, risotto or soup) followed by secondo (meat or fish) with contorni (vegetables) on the side. Each dish should be chosen for how it fits with the others, not treated as a standalone plate. Seeing the meal as a whole changes how you pick a dish: a rich primo calls for a simple secondo, and pasta is not served as a main course with meat on the same plate.