A tribute to Mamma Marcella

Quick, who said: “If the definition of poetry allowed that it could be composed with the products of the field as well as with words, pesto would be in every anthology”?

Longboat Key’s one and only Marcella Hazan. She’s the mother of Italian cooking in this country, the author of The Classic Italian Cookbook, Marcella Says, Marcella Cucina, Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, and a few other Marcella books in the same vein. She introduced balsamic vinegar to this country (by way of Chuck Williams, of Williams-Sonoma), and just as Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a book that many Francophile cooks slept with under their pillows, so too was Hazan’s first book in 1973 the kind of cookbook that serious students of Italian cuisine eventually had to replace with a fresh copy (too much sauce gumming up the pages).

Hazan’s in her 80s now and this native of Cesenatico, Italy has called Florida home for the past eight years. Having moved countless times, (“four times across the ocean,” in her words), she’s feeling settled.

“Our son moved here to Florida. My husband and I only knew the East Coast of Florida and we didn’t like it, so we were surprised by his move. We were in Italy, and we came down to cheer him up and we found that this place was completely different from the East Coast. We love to be near the water—we lived for 20 years in Venice with water all around—and we like the beach and the warm weather.”

Hazen herself didn’t cook a lick before she got married. But she learned fast. She got her start in culinary education in the 1950s, just teaching her friends the fundamentals of Italian cooking from her New York apartment kitchen. Americans were woefully ignorant of real Italian cuisine, despite the 5 million southern Italians that poured into country by the end of the first World War. If it wasn’t Franco-American canned spaghetti or Kraft parmesan cheese in the ubiquitous green shaker, we didn’t know much about it.

“I was also teaching how to eat,” Hazan remembers. “In Italy, people don’t eat just a dish of pasta and a salad. They have different courses, but the courses are small. That was the first thing my students learned. I was teaching menus. Every menu was different, with different ingredients, so I took the students to the market, so they could see what it was they were going to use. It was very simple recipes with very few ingredients—people think it’s such a production to make a meal. It was important for me to teach the feeling and the taste. I never tried to teach them presentation of a dish. That’s not important to me—you have to eat it, not look at it.”

It was Craig Claiborne of the New York Times who gave Hazan’s vital and incisive spin on Italian cooking its big break in the early 1970s. Her classes became so popular that she began writing all of it down, a project that eventually became The Classic Italian Cookbook.

All of her books lay out the principles of Italian cooking in no-nonsense, understandable prose, and the most recent, Marcella Says (2004), is filled with the wisdom—and the passion—she’s shared at her culinary classes for more than three decades.

It’s as she says: “Music and cooking are so much alike. There are people who, simply by working hard at it, become technically quite accomplished at either art. But it isn't until one connects technique to feeling, turning it into the outward thrust of that feeling, that one becomes a musician, or a cook.”

Of the Sarasota area’s culinary scene, Hazan has qualified praise: “At first we had only Publix, but now we have many nice food stores, and there are some vegetable farms for produce I get at the farmers’ market. There are some Italian restaurants where you can find some dishes where they do it right. I love Chinese food, but it’s better to forget about it here.”

Never at a loss for an opinion, when asked which of her books Hazan favors, she seems stumped but quickly regroups.

“That’s like asking which of your children you like best… Essentials [of Classic Italian Cooking] is more like a textbook, with home-cooking dishes that most people who like Italian food know about or have heard about. That book is still going very well, sold all over the world.”

These days, though, Hazan isn’t teaching Americans to cook, or working on a cookbook at all. She’s writing her memoir, the manuscript for which is due in June. She once said, “I cook for flavor. Like truth, it needs no embellishment.” We can rest assured that her memoir will be full of both truth and flavor.