Dear Michael, what I have hoped to communicate through my cookbooks and my classes is the character of a cuisine that is still not widely understood, what I might call "la cucina borghese", middle-class Italian home cooking. You'd be hard put to find a middle class housewife boiling pork or lamb or scraps for broth. Nor would she boil down that broth by half to concentrate it. The light hand of a broth made with pieces of beef and veal in part attached to bones, and definitely not roasted - forget classic French cooking Michael if you to get the Italian accent right - is what gives risotto or minestra di verdura the delicay of flavor and satisfaction that are not French, not cucina povera, but the properties of the middle class Italian family table. The intuitions of la cucina contadina or subsistence cooking can often be a source of inspiration, strained however, through the perceptions of a bourgeois palate. Thank you for your thoughtful attention to my work, and my very best wishes. Marcella