How Marcella Hazan Became a Legend of Italian Cooking

When Marcella Hazan was seven years old, she fell on the beach and broke her right arm. It was 1931, and she and her family were living in the Egyptian city of Alexandria. At the hospital, her arm was placed in a cast that stretched from her shoulder to the tips of her knuckles. The pain didn’t subside after a few days, though, and the color of her hand began to dull. Her doctor removed the cast, revealing gangrenous skin that resembled the flesh of a rotting peach. Hazan needed multiple surgeries from an orthopedic surgeon at a hospital in the family’s native Italy, which forced them to move back to Cesenatico, the fishing town where Hazan (née Polini) was born. Her hand refused to fully straighten from that point forward, but—thank goodness—it functioned well enough to grip a knife.

For many years, Hazan’s experience in the kitchen was limited to menial chores. During the war, she would prepare gruel from mulberry leaves, water, and polenta flour to fatten up piglets for slaughter. She pursued studies in biology and the natural sciences at the University of Ferrara, with plans to become a teacher. It was only when she met her future husband, a quietly charismatic Italian-born man named Victor Hazan, in the early nineteen-fifties, that her culinary interests deepened. Food stimulated Victor, and he cooked often. Hazan, meanwhile, only knew how to make gruel for pigs.

Victor and Hazan were married in 1955, and Victor’s parents persuaded him to join them in New York and work at his father’s fur business. Hazan was hopeful the day, in September, when she rode a taxi from Manhattan to Victor’s apartment in Forest Hills, Queens. But she soon felt the weight of all she’d left behind in Italy. One hurdle was feeding herself. During her first days in America, Victor took Hazan to a café. Though he was a man with a sophisticated palate, he also knew how to enjoy America’s simple gustatory pleasures. When he poured ketchup over hamburger meat, she was appalled. She could not comprehend the American impulse to pollute a dish with such sweet sludge. American supermarkets likewise flummoxed her, with their produce and meats suffocating in plastic. The poor tomatoes were subjected to chemical malpractice in America—gassed, transported over a long distance, then hastened back to life like zombies. To Hazan’s shock, some foods were even frozen.

There was only one way for Hazan to survive in this country: learn to cook. She turned to “Il talismano della felicità” (“The Talisman of Happiness”), a book by the Italian food writer Ada Boni, whose words ferried her back to the home she missed. Hazan began modestly, with soups made from potatoes and leeks, or cannellini and parsley. She worked her way up to frying, sheathing slices of zucchini in pastella, a batter of flour and water. With time, she realized that there had always been a cook inside her. Cooking came to her “as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak,” she later wrote in her memoir, “Amarcord.”

One gateway was Pearl’s, a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan that Hazan frequented. She enrolled in a Chinese cooking class, where a handful of curious students persuaded Hazan to teach them Italian cooking. “I said to Victor, the American women, they’re crazy,” she recalled telling her husband. But he encouraged her. In 1969, she started hosting classes once a week out of the family apartment, now in Manhattan. Some of her students were unaccustomed to consuming ingredients like lamb kidneys; others didn’t want to touch raw squid. Hazan saw each class as its own fight. If she could get just one student to stir calamari into her risotto, then she’d won a small battle.

By 1970, her classes had caught the eye of Craig Claiborne, the food editor of the Times, who asked for an interview. Knowing that the stakes were high, Hazan prepared dishes like upside-down artichokes, tortelloni with Swiss chard and ricotta, and veal rolls plump with pancetta and Parmesan cheese. Her charms worked on him, and the resulting half-page story earned her a swarm of new prospective students. A year later, Hazan received a call from Peter Mollman, an editor at Harper & Row, who asked if she’d ever thought of writing a cookbook. She said no; she could barely write in English. But Victor, overhearing the conversation, insisted that he’d be able to translate for her. Her book “The Classic Italian Cook Book,” was released in the spring of 1973. Its two hundred and fifty recipes focussed on the cuisines that Hazan knew best, those of Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany. “The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn’t exist,” she wrote in her introduction. “The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and usually hostile states.”

To Hazan, Harper & Row didn’t seem to be doing much to draw attention to the book. This gave Victor a bold idea. He wrote a letter to Julia Child, asking how they could generate more publicity. Child introduced Hazan to her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones, whom Hazan initially found quite charming—her husky voice made her sound so American, Hazan thought. Jones helped Hazan wriggle out of her contract with Harper & Row, and Knopf reissued “The Classic Italian Cook Book” in 1976. But the relationship between the two women soured as they collaborated on Hazan’s second cookbook, “More Classic Italian Cooking” (1978). Travelling through Italy and documenting recipes with a tape recorder, Hazan sought to represent “the authentic language of the kitchen that is spoken in Italy today,” she wrote. But Jones didn’t get what was so Italian about preparations like cauliflower gratin in béchamel sauce. “It’s just old cauliflower with white sauce, so trite,” Hazan later recalled Jones telling her. “There is nothing Italian about it.” Hazan disagreed. Béchamel, or balsamella, was an essential part of the repertoire of Italian home cooks, found in layered dishes such as timballo and lasagne alla bolognese. For the cauliflower dish, she stirred slices of the vegetable into a sleek sauce tickled with parmesan and nutmeg, then topped the mixture with more parmesan and baked it until it developed an amber crust. When, Hazan wondered, did an American like Jones become the arbiter of what food was and was not Italian? The women collaborated again but eventually parted ways.

Many of history’s female immigrant chefs and cookbook writers were underappreciated in their day, or rose to fame during their lifetimes only to fall out of public memory after their deaths. Hazan, of course, is not one of those chefs. At the height of her career, she became so popular that Bloomingdale’s created a boutique in its storefront on Fifty-ninth Street called Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen, stocking it with her homemade pasta Bolognese and extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany. For her 1997 book, “Marcella Cucina,” HarperCollins gave her a six-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar advance, higher than any that had been reported for an American cookbook at the time. In the years since her death, in 2013, Hazan has arguably only grown in stature. Younger generations of cooks today still swear by the simplicity of what she called, in her first cookbook, the “Tomato Sauce III,” an economical recipe that called for four ingredients simmered in a pot. Her name—like Emeril or Nigella, she’s often just Marcella—has become synonymous with the ease and allure of Italian cooking.

Still, Hazan had the same spirit of pragmatism and tenacity that allowed many immigrant female chefs of her era, including those less remembered today, to make a mark on the way America cooks and eats. When Knopf refused to submit her 1992 book, “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” for consideration for the James Beard Awards, she submitted the book on her own—and won, in the category of Best Italian Cookbook. An avid chain-smoker since her teens, she eventually developed emphysema, and she never learned to write well in English. But with Victor as her creative partner—and her daily lunch companion—she kept working into the last decade of her life, from their home in Longboat Key, Florida. Most of all, Hazan remained honest about the fact that she had fallen into a career in food. “Darling, I never did in my life anything that I was not asked to do it,” she once told NPR, her Italian accent dense, unmistakable. “It was not my idea, never.”

Cavolfiore Gratinato con la Balsamella (Gratin of Cauliflower with Béchamel Sauce)

Excerpted by permission from “More Classic Italian Cooking,” by Marcella Hazan.

• 1 medium, young head cauliflower
• Salt
• Béchamel sauce, of medium density (recipe follows)
• ⅔ cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese
• ⅛ tsp. grated nutmeg
• 2 Tbsp. butter

1. Wash the cauliflower in cold water, trim away the base of the stem, and pull off and discard all the tough, large outer leaves. Cut it into 4 wedges.

2. Bring 3 to 4 quarts unsalted water to a boil. Put in the cauliflower. When the water returns to a boil, cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Then drain.

3. Cut the cauliflower into bite-size slices, about ½ inch thick. Sprinkle lightly with salt, and set aside. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

4. Make the ​​béchamel sauce, following instructions below. When the sauce reaches medium density, remove from heat and mix in all but 2 Tbsp. of the grated cheese, and all the nutmeg.

5. In a bowl, gently mix the sliced cauliflower with the béchamel.

6. Smear a baking dish with butter. Put in the cauliflower and all the béchamel from the bowl. The dish should be large enough so that the layer of cauliflower is not more than 1½ inches thick. Sprinkle on top the remaining 2 Tbsp. grated cheese. Dot with butter.

7. Bake in the uppermost level of the oven for 20 minutes, or until a light brown crust is formed. Remove from the oven, and allow it to rest for about 10 minutes before serving. The fine, mild flavors of this dish emerge when the heat subsides.

Salsa Balsamella (Béchamel Sauce)

• 2 cups milk
• 4 Tbsp. butter
• 3 Tbsp. all-purpose flour
• ¼ tsp. Salt

1. Put the milk in a saucepan, turn on the heat to medium low, and bring the milk just to the verge of boiling, when it begins to form a ring of small, pearly bubbles.

2. While you are heating the milk, put the butter in a heavy-bottomed, 4-to-6-cup saucepan, and turn on the heat to low. When the butter has melted completely, add all the flour, stirring it in with a wooden spoon. Cook, while stirring constantly, for about 2 minutes. Do not allow the flour to darken. Remove from heat.

3. Add the hot milk to the flour-and-butter mixture, no more than 2 tablespoons at a time. Stir steadily and thoroughly. As soon as the first 2 tablespoons have been incorporated into the mixture, add 2 more, and continue to stir. Repeat this procedure until you have added ½ cup milk; then you can put in the rest of the milk ½ cup at a time, stirring steadfastly, until all the milk has been smoothly amalgamated with the flour and butter.

4. Place the pan over low heat, add the salt, and cook, stirring without interruption, until the sauce is as dense as thick cream. To make it even thicker, if a recipe requires it, cook and stir a little longer. For a thinner sauce, cook it a little less. If you find any lumps forming, beat the béchamel rapidly with a whisk.

​​This is the fourth in a series of columns adapted from “Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America,” by Mayukh Sen, which is out this month from W. W. Norton & Company.