On Sunday, the great Italian chef and cookbook author Marcella Hazan died, at the age of eighty-nine. Marcella changed my life. Twenty years ago, my wife and I went to Italy for our honeymoon and I discovered the wonders of Italian food. I returned from the trip determined that, for the rest of my life, I would eat only the way I had during those three weeks of culinary bliss. There was one huge problem—I was a terrible cook. The little cooking I did usually involved frying in Wesson oil and saucing with Paul Newman salad dressing. Fresh ingredients were not in the picture; having grown up in New York in the fifties, I had pretty much accepted my mother’s theory that any food item not wrapped in plastic was probably covered with germs.
What I needed was a teacher. And I found mine in Marcella’s “The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.” All I had to do was follow her instructions to the letter, and success was pretty much guaranteed. If you’ve ever seen Marcella on television, you know that she was a short, compact lady, a tough biscotti with a raspy voice who didn’t suffer fools gladly and had a surprising preference for Jack Daniels over a glass of wine. But in her books her voice is always warm and encouraging. This, and the fact that her recipes are consistently clear and straightforward, enabled me to overcome a lifetime of insecurity in the kitchen. She just made it all seem so easy. For example, there is her classic tomato sauce with onion and butter, her gift to the beginner Italian cook and the first thing I made from the book. She begins the recipe by saying, “This is the simplest of all sauces to make, and none has a purer, more irresistibly tomato taste. I have known people to skip the pasta and eat the sauce directly out of the pot with a spoon.” All you do is put the tomatoes in the pan, add a medium-sized onion cut in half and the butter, and simmer for forty-five minutes.
It also helped that she has precise rules—only use the best olive oil, do not put salt in your aio e oio until you toss it at the end, never cook a tomato sauce in a covered pan, or it will end up being “bland, steamed, weakly formulaic.” I do well with rules.
Soon I was whipping up asparagus risotto, pan-roasted quail with pancetta, spaghetti vongole, braised carrots with capers. I started shopping at farmer’s markets and buying thirty-dollar bottles of balsamic vinegar. My wife and I stopped going to restaurants or ordering takeout every night of the week. I actually started having people over for dinner. I loved my own cooking.
In 2003, I was able to express my reverence for my teacher with this cartoon, which appeared in Gastronomica magazine:
Not long afterward, I received a letter from Marcella herself, asking me for permission to use the cartoon on the menu of her eightieth-birthday celebration in Verona, Italy. A copy of the menu is framed on my studio wall. Several years later, she published her memoir, “Amarcord: Marcella Remembers,” and the cartoon appears on the last page of the book. She and her husband, Victor, came to New York for the book party, and I finally had the chance to meet her. After a few minutes of awkward conversation, during which we were constantly being interrupted by various famous chefs and celebrities from the food world, I told in her in six different ways how much she had meant to me, and I was able to blurt out that my proudest moment in the kitchen had been when my wife and I worked together to recreate her very challenging torta di carciofi—artichoke-and-ricotta pie. This got her attention.
“You made that?” she said. “Americans don’t make that. It is too difficult. And too much work. You must be very, very good!”
How do you say “kvelling” in Italian? I’m still kvelling from that years later.
Grazie, Marcella.
