Marcella Hazan: Memoir of a classic Italian chef

As it happened, I had already accepted an invitation to teach in the Napa Valley wine country in the spring of the following year. The courses were organized by Michael James, a long-haired, delicate-looking young man with a thin mustache, and his friend and associate, Billy Cross. Michael had been a student of Julia Child’s old partner, Simone Beck, known to all as Simca. Simca was to launch the event, followed by Jacques Pépin, and I was to conclude it with a three-week stint.

The venue for the courses was a Victorian villa, but my accommodations were in an adjacent cottage. Students could sign up for a two-day or three-day course or for a full week. Evenings were free. I was puzzled to find that Michael and Billy, who did all the marketing, would come back with quantities of ingredients much greater than I had requested. “Why so much food?” I asked Michael. “There is going to be a lot left over.” “Don’t worry about it, Marcella; we don’t want the students to think we are skimping.” I was not too happy about it because I hate leftovers and try to avoid them. I have never had a microwave in my kitchens. Few are the dishes that taste as good reheated as they do when freshly cooked. Cold or warmed-over pasta, for example, is unspeakable. On our first Saturday evening, Michael asked me to join them for dinner in the villa. When I walked in, I discovered the reason for the large quantities of food I had cooked. All the dishes from my classes had been resuscitated, and friends of Michael and Billy were feasting on them. The room was filled with young men and votive candles, and I felt extremely uncomfortable. As soon as I could, I grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese and fled to my room.

One of our students was Dagmar Sullivan, whose grandfather, Georges de Latour, had founded Beaulieu Vineyard. On Monday morning, she asked me how I had spent the weekend. “In my room,” I said. “What a pity,” she said. “We have to do something about that.” She alerted everyone in the Valley, and from that moment, I was never alone for dinner in the evening. No one is more hospitable than wine people, and I enjoyed the company, the food, and the wines at table with the Heitzes, the Jaegers, the Mondavis, with Dagmar and her amusing husband,Walter, of course, and with many others whose names have now slipped away beyond recall.

Another of my students at the villa was a tall, blond, robust cooking teacher from San Francisco, Loni Kuhn. Soon after, when I opened a cooking school in Bologna, Loni was one of the first to attend. She invited me to come to San Francisco in the winter to give classes at her school, which I did for many years. I became then as much at home in San Francisco as I was in New York. For the entire time that I was there, Jim Nassikas, the general manager of the Stanford Court hotel, generously made available the suite that was always reserved for James Beard when he came to town. Nassikas used to joke that he carried cigarette butts in his pocket that he distributed in odd corners of the hallways to see how long it would take the staff to sweep them away. It was only a slight exaggeration, and I can’t even be sure that it wasn’t true. I have never known a more immaculate hotel than the Stanford Court of those early Jim Nassikas years. Jim liked to cook, but I was never able to persuade him that you can’t make a true risotto unless you stir it.

Video   Teaching classic Italian cooking Oct. 7: Italian cooking expert Marcella Hazan reflects on her years of teaching others to cook classic Italian dishes. Today show

Victor and I made a great many friends in California, and one of those whose company I most enjoyed was Jeremiah Tower. He had charm, good looks, and the poise of a gentleman. He was no longer cooking at Chez Panisse, but he used to take us for lunch to the café upstairs, driving us there in a marvelous car whose interior glowed with more polished wood than I had ever seen inside an automobile. We talked a lot about cooking, of course, and although the places we had come from, Australia and Italy, were so distant from each other, our feelings about food had the same origin. We had a kindred devotion to taste, taste free of affectation, taste that was clear, bold, and simple, taste that wanted only to be good. The meals that Jeremiah cooked for us at the places he subsequently opened, the Santa Fe Café and Stars, were the most delectable seafood feasts I have ever had in America, comparable with the best that I have ever had in Italy or in Asia. He eventually left San Francisco; he was in Hong Kong for a while, and in New York, but after the publication of his idol-smashing memoir in 2003, I lost his tracks. Sometimes in my daydreams, Jeremiah and I are as young as we were then, and I am still licking my fingers over his crab, lobster, and shrimp.

I had finished my third week of teaching for Michael at the Napa Valley villa, and I was packing to leave for New York, looking forward to being with Victor again, when I got a telephone call. It was Danny Kaye. “I am in Seattle. Tonight I am conducting the Seattle Symphony; tomorrow morning early I am returning to Los Angeles.” He then gave me the number and time of a flight that I was to take from San Francisco to Los Angeles. “You will land not too long after me,” he said. “I’ll wait for you at the gate, we’ll go marketing, and in the evening I’ll make dinner.” “But Danny, I already have a ticket for New York and Victor is expecting me.” I don’t think he even heard. “Look for me at the gate,” he said. “I’ll be there waiting.” And he hung up. When I called Victor, he said, “You don’t want to stand him up. Go, you’ll have a good time.”

As I came off the plane, I had no trouble spotting Danny under his soft-brimmed hat with an outsize crocodile logo. He drove us home, where I was given just enough time to put my bag down and use the bathroom. Before heading for the farmer’s market, he leafed through the book of menus he had served. “To jog my memory,” he said. When we returned, he showed me his kitchens, one for Western cooking, one for Chinese. The stove of the latter was as he had described when we had talked in New York; when the burners were at their maximum setting, the gas came on like a blast from a jet engine.

Of the people at table, I remember Danny’s wife, Sylvia Fine, a funny lady; the actor Roddy McDowall; and Olive Behrendt, a patron of the Los Angeles Symphony. I would see a lot of Olive in later years in Venice. She had passed the city’s tough skipper’s exam and piloted her own motorboat through the baffling shallows of the lagoon. A heart attack eventually landed her in Venice’s hospital, where she died alone and neglected in a common ward. There were others, but I have forgotten who they were and there is no one left alive from that evening whom I could ask.

Danny never came to the table. He cooked a dish that his Chinese assistant served to us, and while we were eating, he sat in a pantry pulling hard on his pipe. When the assistant told him we had finished, he prepared another dish, and again he retired, through to the end of dinner. I wish I’d had the nerve to ask him when and what he ate, but Danny didn’t respond gently to interrogation. My memories of food are some of my sharpest, and they go back to the earliest moments of my conscious life, yet while I recall being happy at Danny’s dinner, I don’t remember a single dish I had. It had been a long, restless, and anomalous day whose happenings, at its end, had become hazy.

My greatest concern, whenever I wake up in the morning away from home, is where and how soon I am going to get a cup of coffee. I had been lodged in Dena’s room upstairs, and when I came out of my sleep early that morning, I wrapped a robe around me and I tiptoed quietly downstairs, headed for the kitchen. Danny was already there, blowing huge clouds of smoke from his pipe. “It’s about time you came down,” he said. “We have got a lot to do. We are going to make pasta and fegato alla veneziana” (sautéed liver and onions Venetian style). We cooked and finished lunch barely in time for me to make the flight to New York.

The next time I heard from Danny, I was teaching a class in my apartment. One of the students was Pamela Fiori, today the editor in chief of Town & Country magazine. She was then on the staff of Travel & Leisure magazine, for which she was taping the lesson.

“What are you doing?” said Danny on the phone.

“I am teaching.”

“What are you teaching?”

“I am making pasta, a roast of veal, sautéed vegetables, and marinated oranges.”

“What kind of sauce do you have on the pasta?”

I told him.

“How do you make the veal?”

“Where are you, Danny?” I asked.

“In New York.”

“Look, I am in class now and I can’t talk. If you really want to know what I am cooking, come over.”

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