Cookbook icon Marcella Hazan loved salt, hated too much garlic
LONGBOAT KEY, FLA. Marcella Hazan, the Italian-born cookbook author who taught generations how to create simple, fresh Italian food, has died. She was 89.
Hazan died Sunday morning at her home in Florida, according to an email from her son, Giuliano Hazan, and posts on Facebook and Twitter from her husband and daughter-in-law.
Hazan was best known for her six cookbooks, written by her in Italian and translated into English by Victor, her husband of 57 years.
The recipes were traditional, tasty and sparse — her famous tomato sauce contained only tomatoes, onion, butter and salt — and mirrored the tastes of her home country, where importance is placed on the freshness of food, rather than the whiz-bang recipes inside a chef ’s mind.
She eschewed North American-style Italian food that suffocated mushy pasta in grainy meatballs and tasteless cheese.
She begged home cooks to use more salt and once wrote that if readers were concerned about salt affecting one’s life expectancy, to “not read any further.” On the topic of garlic, Hazan took a sharp view.
“The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” she wrote in her 2004 cookbook Marcella Says ...
“It must remain a shadowy background presence. It cannot take over the show.”
Marcella Pollini was born in 1924 in Cesenatico in the Emilia-Romana region of Italy. She didn’t intend to be a professional cooking teacher or author. She graduated from the University of Ferrara with a doctorate in natural sciences and biology.
But then she met Victor Hazan, who was born in Italy but raised in New York. The couple married in 1955 and moved to the U.S., and she realized she needed to feed her husband, who longed for the flavours of Italy.
One year, she went to take a Chinese cooking class, but the instructor cancelled the class. The other students decided they wanted Hazan to teach them to cook Italian food.
So she began offering cooking classes from her New York City apartment. Those classes blossomed into a lifelong business of teaching.
She and Victor opened a cooking school in Bologna, then in Venice, where classes took place in a 16th century palazzo with a customdesigned kitchen.
Hazan gave birth to a son, Giuliano, in 1958. He shared his parents’ love of food and also became a cookbook author. Giuliano and his wife run a cooking school in Verona.
He also makes frequent visits to the Today Show, teaching his mother’s recipes. Earlier this year, Giuliano Hazan published Hazan Family Favorites, drawing on his memories of his parents and grandparents and the food they ate for decades.
It was Marcella Hazan’s 1973 cookbook, The Classic Italian Cookbook, that led gourmands to draw comparisons between Hazan and another larger-than-life cookbook author: Julia Child. The two women were longtime friends.