Marcella Hazan

Based on Wikipedia: Marcella Hazan

The Woman Who Taught America to Cook Italian

Marcella Hazan never cooked a meal until she was thirty-one years old. She had two doctoral degrees in biology and natural sciences. She had worked as a science teacher. And then she married Victor Hazan and moved to New York City, where she suddenly faced a problem that no amount of laboratory training had prepared her for: feeding a husband who could tolerate most of life's disappointments, but absolutely could not abide a mediocre dinner.

From this domestic crisis emerged one of the most influential culinary careers of the twentieth century.

By the time of her death in 2013, Hazan had transformed how Americans and Britons understood Italian food. Before her cookbooks arrived on kitchen shelves in the early 1970s, most English speakers thought Italian cooking meant spaghetti with heavy meat sauce, pizza, and perhaps a veal dish smothered in cheese. Hazan revealed something different entirely: a cuisine built on restraint, seasonality, and a few perfect ingredients treated with respect.

A Scientist in the Kitchen

Hazan was born in 1924 in Cesenatico, a fishing town on Italy's Adriatic coast in the Emilia-Romagna region. This geographical detail matters enormously. Emilia-Romagna is often called the stomach of Italy, home to Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese, prosciutto di Parma, balsamic vinegar from Modena, and the egg-rich pasta traditions of Bologna. Growing up there meant absorbing a culinary education simply by existing—watching her mother cook, her father cook, both grandmothers cook, even the farm girls who came to clean the house.

But Hazan herself never learned. She was bookish, drawn to science, and in postwar Italy she pursued an unusual path for a woman: university education. She earned her first degree in natural sciences from the University of Ferrara, then a second in biology from the University of Padua. She became a teacher.

In 1955, she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-born man who had grown up in New York City. Victor came from a Sephardic Jewish family—Jews whose ancestors had lived in Spain and Portugal before the expulsions of 1492, carrying their distinct traditions through the Mediterranean world. A few months after their wedding, the couple moved to New York.

And there Marcella was, alone in an American kitchen, with no one to cook for her.

Memory as Recipe

She started with Italian cookbooks, but they frustrated her. The instructions seemed wrong, the results disappointing. Then she realized something crucial: she didn't need books. She had spent her entire childhood and young adulthood eating the food of Emilia-Romagna. The flavors were stored in her memory with scientific precision. She could simply work backward from taste to technique.

"Eventually I learned that some of the methods I adopted were idiosyncratically my own," she later wrote, "but for most of them I found corroboration in the practices of traditional Italian cooks."

This approach—starting from sensory memory rather than written instruction—became central to her teaching philosophy. Italian cooking, she would argue, was not about following recipes mechanically. It was about understanding what food should taste like and working toward that goal.

From Apartment Lessons to National Fame

Hazan began teaching cooking classes in her New York apartment. Word spread. In 1969, she formalized the operation as the School of Classic Italian Cooking. Her students were mostly American women who had traveled to Italy and returned mystified: why couldn't they recreate what they had eaten?

Hazan could explain why. And she could fix it.

Her breakthrough came in the early 1970s when Craig Claiborne, the legendary food editor of the New York Times, discovered her classes. Claiborne was the most powerful figure in American food journalism. His approval could make a restaurant or a cookbook author. He asked Hazan to contribute recipes to the Times.

In 1973, she published The Classic Italian Cook Book. It was a revelation.

The book sold steadily for years. In 1978, she followed it with More Classic Italian Cooking. In 1980, a British edition adapted by the food writer Anna Del Conte won the André Simon Award, one of the United Kingdom's highest culinary honors. In 1992, the two books were combined and revised as Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which became her definitive work.

Her 1997 book Marcella Cucina swept the major awards: the James Beard Foundation prize for Best Mediterranean Cookbook and the Julia Child Award for Best International Cookbook.

Through all of this, Victor served as her translator. Marcella wrote in Italian—she never fully trusted her English for the precision her recipes required—and Victor rendered her words into the language her American readers needed.

The Hazan Method

What made her cookbooks different? Several things, all interconnected.

First, she was uncompromising about authenticity. Her recipes contained no American shortcuts, no substitutions for convenience, no fusion experiments. If a dish required a specific Italian ingredient, she told you so, and she explained why the substitute wouldn't work. She made concessions only when an ingredient was genuinely impossible to find outside Italy.

Second, she taught Italian meal structure, not just individual dishes. Traditional Italian meals proceed through courses in a specific order: perhaps a pasta dish, then a meat or fish course, then salad, then dessert. Each course is designed to balance and complement the others. American and British cooks tended to treat Italian recipes as interchangeable main courses. Hazan explained the underlying logic.

Third, she valued simplicity achieved through effort. This sounds paradoxical, so consider her most famous recipe: a whole chicken roasted with two lemons stuffed in its cavity. That's it. No marinade, no elaborate spice rub, no complex technique. Just a chicken and two lemons. The simplicity is the point. The difficulty lies in sourcing a good chicken and understanding how heat transforms it.

Her tomato sauce recipe became equally legendary—just tomatoes, butter, and an onion, cooked slowly until the flavors concentrate. The New York Times cooking section cites it constantly, decades after she first published it.

Specific Techniques She Championed

Hazan had strong opinions, and she expressed them without apology. Some of her most influential teachings:

On vegetables: Choose what's in season and build your entire meal around those choices. Soak vegetables in cold water for thirty minutes before cooking to remove every trace of grit. Cook them until they're genuinely tender—not crunchy, not mushy, but tender enough to release their full flavor.

On onions: Start them in a cold pan with oil, then heat gently. This slow approach releases their sweetness gradually. Starting onions in a hot pan produces a sharper, less mellow result.

On pasta: Fresh homemade pasta is superior for some shapes, like tagliatelle, the wide ribbons typical of Bologna. But other shapes, like spaghetti, should be bought dried from a good Italian manufacturer. The texture is different, and some sauces demand that dried-pasta texture. Always match pasta shapes to sauces deliberately.

On cooking fats: Olive oil is not universally superior. For delicately flavored dishes, a combination of butter and vegetable oil produces better results than olive oil, which can overwhelm subtle tastes.

On garlic presses: Never. Under any circumstances. The press crushes garlic cells in a way that releases harsh, bitter compounds. Mince it with a knife instead.

The Voice Behind the Recipes

Hazan's cookbooks are as much memoir as instruction manual. She frequently introduces recipes with stories of how the dish is eaten in Italy, or with her own memories of discovering it.

Consider her introduction to granita di caffè con panna, coffee ice with whipped cream:

"Granita di caffè con panna was the most welcome sign that Italian cafés used to put out in summer. On an afternoon slowed down by the southern sun, it was one of the best ways to while away the time, watching life dawdle by as you let the granita's crystals melt on the tongue, spoonful by spoonful, until the roof of your mouth felt like an ice cavern pervaded by the aroma of strong coffee."

This is not standard cookbook prose. It's sensory writing, designed to make you taste the ice crystals before you've bought the coffee beans.

The food critic Craig Seligman captured the complexity of Hazan's authorial presence in a review for Salon. He complained about her "impatient and judgmental tone"—she could be curt, dismissive of shortcuts, intolerant of compromise. But he concluded: "her recipes are so beautiful and so reliable and, most of the time, so brilliantly simple that what can you do but venerate her and love her in spite of herself?"

That impatience was genuine. Hazan was a scientist by training, and she brought scientific rigor to cooking. Precision mattered. Sloppiness produced inferior results. If her books sometimes read as demanding, it's because she demanded excellence from herself first.

Unintended Consequences

Hazan's influence extended beyond her own recipes. She helped introduce balsamic vinegar to American cooks—and later regretted it.

Traditional balsamic vinegar from Modena is an extraordinary product. The genuine article, labeled "Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale," is aged for a minimum of twelve years, sometimes twenty-five or more. It's viscous, complex, sweet and sour simultaneously, and extremely expensive. A small bottle can cost hundreds of dollars.

What Americans discovered in the 1980s and 1990s was mostly something else: industrial balsamic, made quickly by adding caramel and flavorings to wine vinegar. This cheaper product became ubiquitous, splashed onto everything from salads to strawberries to steaks.

Hazan watched this happen with dismay. She had wanted to share a precious ingredient; instead, she'd unleashed a condiment fad. Her later books cautioned readers about the difference between real balsamic and its imitators, and about the importance of using even good balsamic sparingly.

Florida and Final Years

In 1998, Hazan retired from active teaching. She and Victor moved to Longboat Key, a barrier island off Florida's Gulf Coast, seeking warmth and quiet.

The move created an unexpected problem. In New York, Hazan had access to Italian specialty importers, shops run by immigrants who stocked authentic ingredients. In Florida, she could not find what she needed. The situation would have frustrated most cookbook authors, but Hazan saw an opportunity.

She decided to write a book for cooks in similar circumstances—people who understood Italian cooking but couldn't access traditional Italian ingredients. The result was Marcella Says..., published in 2004, which taught adaptation and substitution in ways her earlier books had deliberately avoided.

She continued teaching occasional courses at the French Culinary Institute in New York. In 2003, the Italian government made her a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity, honoring her role as a cultural ambassador.

Marcella Hazan died on September 29, 2013, at her home in Longboat Key, from complications of emphysema. She was eighty-nine years old.

The Hazan Legacy

Her son Giuliano became a cookbook author and cooking teacher in his own right, continuing the family tradition. Victor, who had built a parallel career as a wine writer, survived her.

In 2025, a documentary simply titled Marcella, directed by Peter Miller, premiered on PBS American Masters. It won the James Beard Award for Best Documentary, bringing Hazan's story to a new generation who might never have encountered her books.

Craig Claiborne, who launched her career, offered what remains the definitive assessment: "No one has ever done more to spread the gospel of pure Italian cookery in America."

The food critic Jeffrey Steingarten, who traveled to the Hazans' Venice apartment for a personal cooking lesson, predicted that Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking "will become the essential Italian cookbook for an entire generation." He was right. Decades later, the book remains in print, still recommended as the starting point for anyone serious about Italian cooking.

What She Taught

Hazan's influence extends beyond specific recipes or techniques. She taught a philosophy: that good cooking comes from understanding ingredients rather than following instructions blindly, that simplicity requires more skill than complexity, that traditions exist for reasons worth understanding before you discard them.

She also demonstrated something about expertise itself. A woman with no culinary training became the most authoritative voice in her field by combining rigorous observation with vivid memory. Her scientific background taught her to analyze processes. Her Italian childhood gave her the sensory benchmarks. Her stubbornness refused to accept anything less than excellence.

The next time you roast a chicken with lemons, or slowly simmer tomatoes with butter and onion, or carefully mince garlic rather than crushing it, you're likely following techniques that Marcella Hazan either introduced to English-speaking cooks or articulated so clearly that they became standard practice.

She never intended to become a cooking teacher. She just wanted to feed her husband a decent dinner. The rest was persistence, precision, and an excellent memory for how food is supposed to taste.