Yesterday, the world lost a culinary great; Marcella Hazan -- the teacher, the author of six cookbooks, and the woman who changed the way Americans cook Italian food -- passed away. To honor her, the Food52 staff is sharing all that we've learned from her.
Amanda: A couple of things I learned from Marcella Hazan:
1. Marcella wrote (and taught) with great conviction, and was unafraid to tell you what not to do, which made you trust her entirely. In a lasagna recipe, she once wrote, "It is extremely important to avoid overcooking lasagna. Mushy lasagna is an abomination. And do not use boxed macaroni lasagna for this recipe." Any questions?
If I ever want to know something about Italian cooking, I open Marcella's books first. Her recipes are also beautifully written -- simple sentences, with the details tightly layered so that no step looks too daunting and she never leaves you vulnerable.
2. Marcella taught us to use freshly ground black pepper (and may be the first cookbook author to put this term in an ingredient list). She got us (or some of us) to understand that pasta dishes are about the pasta, not the sauce. And to value water, which she called the "phantom ingredient" in Italian cooking.
I always loved how she and her husband, Victor, were a team, with Marcella the creative force and Victor the strategist and translator. I was heartened to hear he was with her when she died.
Merrill: Like so many others, Marcella led me to the vital realization that there is no better elixir than tomatoes, onions and butter bubbling together in a pot. And as for butter, she taught me that pretty much everything is better with a spoonful or two -- even pesto.
Hannah: Marcella Hazan is the reason I don't own a garlic press.
Kenzi: Marcella taught me the simple art of red sauce. That sauce is what I make for company, for special occasions, and it's also what I make when it's late and I'm cooking for just myself.
Kristen: I'll say the obvious. Marcella changed how we all make tomato sauce: her way is smarter, purer, better. And by we all, I mean not just her fans but most people who've read a food blog in the past 10 years. Imagine the other gems hiding in her many books -- let's all start blogging about those too.
Marian: Marcella -- via her sauce, whose value has already been articulated -- is the person who taught me that the beauty of Italian cooking is in its simplicity. She was a wrangler of ingredients and a teacher above all else.
Lindsay-Jean: I have to repeat. Marcella taught me how to make tomato sauce. It was a revelation to learn that I never needed to pick up a jar of pasta sauce at a supermarket again.
Maddy: Marcella taught me to love anchovies far, far beyond their role in caesar salads. She taught me to add them to sauces, soups, and spreads without a word to my husband or dinner guests and to trust that no one will realize that a little bit of salty fish is what makes that sauce/soup/spread taste so darn good.
Brette: Marcella Hazan taught me, quite simply, how to cook for myself: her recipes, especially that sauce, were the first things I ever cooked myself when I moved into my own apartment. Through her books, I learned that three ingredients can -- and should! -- make for a fine dinner, and I fully credit her for the way I cook for myself now.
Amelia: One of the greatest things I learned from Marcella Hazan was what simple cooking actually means: "Simple doesn't mean easy. I can describe simple cooking thus: Cooking that is stripped all the way down to those procedures and those ingredients indispensable in enunciating the sincere flavor intentions of a dish."
Amanda: P.S. Yesterday I bought tomatoes at the Greenmarket to make her tomato sauce -- figured it would be the last chance of the season to cook it with fresh tomatoes.
Merrill: Same here!
What did Marcella Hazan teach you?
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https://robinlcole.com/2014/08/18/cooking-the-book-marcella-hazans-essentials-of-classic-italian-cooking/
And she taught me, as an Italian abroad, that you can make it home wherever you go, if you have a handful of ingredients and a pan.
She was clear, direct and, let's face it, more than a little bossy. Her instructions for polenta will drive you mad, but the results are always worth it.
I grew up in an Italian-American neighborhood, the Jewish suburbs and a mid-western college town at a time when French was the only foreign language taught to children in the public schools I attended. We started in fourth grade and it made the most sense to continue conjugating the same set of verbs until my final year of college. During a semester in Paris, I bought a paperback edition of Mastering the Art of French Cooking whose pages ultimately became the first to consult for dinner parties. Like 19th-century Russian aristocrats, Americans still believed deeply in the superiority of French culture.
The two volumes of The Classic Italian Cook Book came out shortly before I moved to a street in New Haven best known for pizza. If you walked in the opposite direction from Sally's and Pepe's, you could buy fresh basil and hunks of imported Parmesan at a small grocery store. It's hard to imagine now that both are staples at supermarkets, but they were about as rare as vegans back then. On the other hand, vegetarians were leaving communes behind, opening food co-ops and going mainstream. Anna Thomas and Mollie Katzen began their careers as cookbook authors around the same time that Marcella Hazan did and you could find The Vegetarian Epicure and Moosewood Cookbook tucked between jars of brown rice and lentils on college campuses everywhere. The idea that a meal could feature beautiful, fresh vegetables was a revelation and drew me to Marcella Hazan's recipes.
It's funny. I completely overlooked the tomato sauce with butter until fairly recently—when it made a splash online. For about a decade, though, the salad of roasted beets and boiled beet greens appeared on my table just every time there were guests. Who would have known what tastes ghastly out of a can could be exalted by roasting? That you could eat the entire plant! I bought a hand-cranked pasta machine because of Marcella and sat at the kitchen table filling an entire grocery bag with thick, prickly leaves to prepare her artichoke lasagne. Clearly the preface to a Neapolitan recipe made a lasting impression; the author recommends a combination of red and yellow bell peppers even though the latter seemed available only to home gardeners. A few years later, I was so delighted to discover find yellow and orange bell peppers at the farmers market in my new hometown that I mailed dozens to a friend in Brooklyn as a birthday present. Why Hazan substitutes red cabbage for black kale, I'll never know, but the soup with pancetta and beans got me through grad school.
It's difficult not to compare Julia Child and Marcella Hazan since their writing introduced two European culinary traditions to so many home cooks in this country. By singling out the Italian vegetable dishes, I don't want to overlook the fact that my crumbling Penguin paperback contains 112 pages of tiny print that offer French counterparts and that Julia Child had so many more obstacles to overcome decades earlier, "tinned mushrooms" and all. So much depends on a simple meal of trout in the French countryside for Julia Child, so the dishes Hazan culls from Italian villages and agrarian settings don't separate the Italian expatriate from an American trained at the Cordon Bleu. Marcella Hazan never became a television personality and the central library in Florence owns only one of her books as far as I know. Still, I suspect Marcella Hazan deserves a lot of credit for moving us beyond the world of "Big Night" (1996) and for the fact that we recognize general distinctions between cooking in Northern and Southern regions of Italy. She paved the way for Lynne Rossetto Kasper's classic on Emilia-Romagna and by the beginning of the 21st century, the number of titles devoted to Italian regional cooking eclipsed the numbers devoted to French cuisine in bookstores. Even Marcella Hazan uses the word "cuisine" when she writes about Italian food. However, I'd like to believe her influence still registers in our greater appreciation for culinary traditions developed outside of France and perhaps, ultimately, in places other than Europe.
We made her outstanding, understated Dolce Torinese for the big dinner party we threw to honor my mother shortly after she died. That says it all, right there. ;o)
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