Marcella Hazan: Memoir of a classic Italian chef

Marcella Hazan has spread her expertise in Italian cooking around the globe. She has received virtually every possible culinary award and has taught classes everywhere from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Cipriani in Venice to Hong Kong's top hotel. In her memoir, "Amarcord," which means "I remember," Hazan shares the story of how she went from being a science teacher in Italy to bringing the art of Italian cooking to America. An excerpt.

A funny thing happened: 1973-1975
In the fall of the year my book was published, I was invited to do a demonstration on the Joyce Brothers television show. The producer looked through the cookbook and chose a recipe for striped bass stuffed with several kinds of shellfish and baked sealed in foil. I had five minutes in which to bone the fish; stuff it with clams, mussels, oysters, and shrimp; wrap it in foil; remove from the oven a similar fish previously prepared and already cooked; unwrap it and slice it, all the while chatting with Dr. Brothers, who was expected to drop in a plug for my book. Just to bone the fish would have taken me twenty minutes, so I boned it at home; then I put the bone back in its place and closed the fish over it. When I was on camera I opened up the fish, I went through the motions of running a knife under the bone, and presto! Off came the whole bone in just seconds.

There was another guest cooking, Enzo Stuarti, a Mario Lanza–style tenor who was going to cook spaghetti. The precooked spaghetti was in a pot of still-boiling water. The pot had a perforated insert for draining cooked pasta, a metal basket that Stuarti lifted and carried past me with scalding water still dripping from it. He let it drip all over my feet. It was my first time on television, but it became the last time that I allowed a producer to choose what I was to demonstrate, and the last time I shared a cooking segment with anyone else.

Like others who have been nurtured by the settled life of a small town, I have never felt a strong urge to expand my habitat. I am not a self-promoter, but New York is a bellows that can fan great flames from small sparks. In the year that my cookbook was published, I was invited to dinners and parties, and in a few months, I had met nearly everyone in, or at the margins of, the city’s food world. I immediately felt strong empathy for and from James Beard. I was startled at first by the open-air shower that he had in the back of his house on West Twelfth Street, but I soon understood that it wasn’t crude exhibitionism; it was a manifestation of his natural candor, of his aversion to cover-ups. I was amazed by what he knew and remembered. He was my living encyclopedia: Whenever I had a question, he had the answer. He had a sonorous voice that he used as a foil for the mischief in his eyes. His laugh was magnificent, rising from deep within his capacious belly. An example of it still rings in my memory’s ears. Sometime after we had become friends, we were both giving cooking classes in Italy, Jim at the Gritti Palace in Venice and I at my school in Bologna. Jim was always collecting recipes for a syndicated column that he wrote. He phoned me in Bologna to ask a question about an ingredient.

“Marcella!” said the booming voice. “I came across a recipe in an Italian magazine that I would like to use, it’s for shrimp with a beautiful pink sauce, and it sounds delicious, but it’s driving me nuts.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There is a mysterious ingredient in it that has to be essential to the pink sauce because nothing else in the list has that color. I have looked it up everywhere, but there is no description of it in any of the sources. I hope you can help me out.”

“I hope so too. What is it?”

“Rubra.”

“Oh, sure, Jim, it’s ketchup.”

“Ketchup?”

“That’s right. Rubra is the best-known Italian brand of ketchup.”

Ho, ho, ho, the big laugh came rolling over the phone line, over and over, such a happy laugh, as though he had just heard the funniest joke in the world.

Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi, both Hungarians and both executives at Restaurant Associates, became the new operators of the Four Seasons and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurants when their company divested itself of those two properties. Paul was very Old World, wearing well-tailored conservative three-piece suits, the vest, crossed by a gold watch chain, resting on a prosperous paunch. He spoke English with a suave accent and had an air of great connoisseurship, looking both paternal and shrewd. When he found out that I came from Cesenatico, he said, “I know it well. When I was young I played on a professional Italian soccer team, and we trained near there.” He was the only person I had met in New York who had heard of and been in my hometown. Tom was jet-settish, fashionable, and briskly entrepreneurial. Both became generous friends, but I got to see more of Tom, perhaps because he was more likely to be away from the restaurant than Paul.

Tom had dinner with us at home and loved what I cooked. He offered to give my cookbook a boost by hosting a fortnight at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurant based on my recipes. For $25, one could have an antipasto, a first course, a second course, salad, and dessert, choosing from a menu of nineteen dishes. One of the two fish dishes offered was the stuffed striped bass I had demonstrated on television. Three Italian wines were included. The event was to run from November 11 through November 23, but it was so successful that they held it over until December 7.

I was there every evening to talk to guests. One evening Tom told me to expect Danny Kaye, who was coming with his daughter Dena. Danny left me no opportunity to talk to anyone else that evening. I learned that cooking was one of his great loves. He had others, of course, including piloting airplanes and dabbling in a variety of medical subjects, but he was obviously an extremely well-informed and deeply committed cook. I discovered too that, aside from Italian cooking, we had another culinary passion in common, Chinese food. Danny described the special Chinese kitchen he had built in his Beverly Hills house. He had gas burners with several concentric rings able to reach such high temperatures that, to make getting close to them tolerable, he had had to install a steel trough in front of the stove with a stream of ice water circulating through it. “Do you know how the Chinese make chicken lollipops?” he asked me. “Come into the kitchen and I’ll show you.” If you are Danny Kaye, you can walk into a restaurant’s busy kitchen unannounced and ask someone to give you a chicken thigh and a knife. He loosened the skin at the knob end of the bone, scraped the flesh upward to leave the bone clean, and turned the skin inside out over the thick part of the drumstick. “There! You now have a chicken lollipop ready for frying. Let me know if you come to California,” Danny said. “I’ll make you a Chinese dinner.”

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