On three consecutive days, over the 9th, 10th and 11th of July 1992, Marcella Hazan and her husband, Victor, gave a three day masterclass at the Ballymaloe Cookery School.
Two things were immediately obvious.
First, Signora Hazan was every bit as formidable as her reputation suggested. Second, her husband, Victor, was an integral part of the team that had so successfully lured cooks away from red sauce faux-Italianate grub and towards the true cuisines of the republics of Italy.
What was also clear was how big a deal Marcella was, because the students in the class had flown into the Ballymaloe school from every corner of the globe: getting an up-close demo with the Queen of Italian food was not something that happened every day of the week.
Marcella was, the NYT said, “the cookbook author who changed how Americans cook Italian food”. Fergus Henderson wrote that “Marcella Hazan single-handedly changed food as I knew it at home”.
Marcella was the grit. Victor was the poet. Marcella’s first book was dedicated to Victor, about whom she wrote: “His name really belongs on the title page.” Indeed it did, because to read the beautifully crafted text of the Hazan books is to actually hear Victor’s beguiling voice, every line as well turned as a madrigal.
In the intervals between the classes, the couple were also finalising the proofs of The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, a mammoth, 720 page re-working of Marcella and Victor’s first two books.
The first of those books, The Classic Italian Cookbook contained the bones of a recipe, for tomato sauce, that today seems almost eternal. Called Tomato Sauce 3, the recipe was simplicity itself: combine a tin of tomatoes with half an onion, 110gs of butter and a pinch of salt and sugar. Simmer for 45 minutes. Discard the onion. Sauce your pasta.
That’s it.
Perhaps because of its simplicity, the recipe has not simply endured for more than half-a-century, it has become progressively iconic, a Rosetta Stone of great cooking.
“What does it have?” Marcella asks. “Pure, sweet tomato taste, at its most appealing. It is an unsurpassed sauce for potato gnocchi, and it is most excellent with spaghetti, penne and ziti.”
Crafting recipes of such copper-fastened certainty is how Marcella Hazan’s reputation endures. That certainty was deeply rooted, as the aphoristic bon mots she dropped during the classes made clear, and which John scribbled down as he took copious pages of notes in an old school exercise book:
Food in Italy is different every 10 kilometres.
Pasta is done when it is like a baby’s skin.
The pasta don’t wait for you: you wait for the pasta.
Italian cooking is: not an excess of anything.
Italian fish differs from Adriatic to Mediterranean seas.
With risotto, you can make it different every day of your life without repeating.
The dishes Marcella cooked were: tonarelli with pesto; casserole-roasted lamb with juniper berries; Swiss chard with Parmesan; strawberry ice cream; rigatoni Neapolitan-style with roasted sweet peppers; crumbly cake; mussels baked with potatoes and fresh tomatoes; risotto with spring vegetables; fish cooked fish-soup style; lemon, cucumber and red pepper salad; carrot and almond cake.
As befits a pair of seasoned, sophisticated Italians, Marcella and Victor – who also talked to the class about Italian wines, Parmesan cheese and olive oil – were a veritable definition of sprezzatura: virtuosic, and understated.
It is twelve years now since Marcella passed away, yet there is a new documentary about her life and work – Marcella – and a small collection of some of her kitchen implements was recently curated at the Smithsonian Institute.
In May, Pete Wells wrote a lengthy tribute to her in The New York Times, describing her impact as nothing less than “a small revolution” and noting that, together with Victor, they shared “a belief that Italian cuisine was one of civilisation’s great achievements.”
It is that belief that makes Marcella’s books irreplaceable, and which means you lift them off the shelf day after day after day. “Ms. Hazan didn’t have followers. She had disciples.” wrote Pete Wells.
Too true, and faithful disciples, at that. You never alter a Marcella, or double-guess what she is doing. When you cook the chicken with lemon, or the Tomato sauce 3, you are in her kitchen, Marcella’s kitchen. She wrote the book, she wrote the bible. Your job is to follow her path.
