‘Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking’ Brooks No Compromise

Marcella Hazan was the Italian superhero in the Judith Jones cookbook universe that dominated food publishing from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Like the other members of that league of extraordinary cooks, Hazan called on the powers of fresh ingredients and homemade stock to fight the scourge of convenience food that had held American kitchens in thrall for most of the 20th century.

Each member of the league fought the evils of corporate cooking in her own way. Julia Child was patient and genial and armed with plenty of wine. Madhur Jaffrey was witty and self-deprecating and wielded a vast array of spices. Claudia Roden’s weapon was deep scholarship, and Edna Lewis called on the tremendous power of nostalgia. But Hazan has a special place in my heart, and not just because canned San Marzano tomatoes have become a grocery store staple thanks to her influence. It’s because of her extremely low tolerance for bullshit. Marcella Hazan had opinions, and she was not afraid to share them.

Published in 1992, her now-classic Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is full of opinions. Black squid ink pasta is “deplorable.” Romano cheese appeals only to “the singular palate.” Pasta extruders are “awful devices”: “What emerges is a mucilaginous and totally contemptible product.” Premade noodles in a lasagne are an aberration, as is coffee cake. (Why is it called coffee cake if it doesn’t taste like coffee?) And don’t even get her started on the crap Americans call “balsamic vinegar.”

But when Hazan loved something, well. One of the delights of Essentials is seeing how hard she tries not to overpraise the food of her home region of Romagna and how quickly she gives up (page 3) because, after all, it does have the best food in Italy, especially hand-rolled pasta.

I personally find this refreshing. Some of us need to be told what tastes best (if only so we can disagree later). Forget this “trust your palate” nonsense. Or the soup recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook that recommends adding “an orange vegetable,” as if there’s no difference between carrots and sweet potatoes. How am I, a cook with a mediocre palate who is still trying to master the rudiments of salt-fat-acid-heat, supposed to evaluate the taste of a dish I have never, ever seen before? Ingredients are expensive. Time is short. Just tell me what to do!

That is the promise of Essentials. It leaves nothing to chance: For every sauce, Hazan offers at least two pasta recommendations, one store-bought and one homemade. On the other hand, failure is not an option. Hazan has been dead since 2013, but I cooked her recipes as though she were right beside me, armed with a wooden spoon and ready to tell me what she really thought. No other cookbook author has frightened me so much, except for Elizabeth David.

The publishing entity known as “Marcella Hazan” was actually two people. One was Marcella Hazan herself, a reluctant immigrant to New York born and raised in Cesenatico, a seaside town not far from Bologna. She had a double PhD in biology and natural sciences and was completely indifferent to food until she was 28 and met her husband Victor. He was also Romagna-born, but his Jewish family had fled to Manhattan in 1939, when he was ten. He loved food and dreamed of becoming a writer. Obviously, this meant he had to return to Italy after the war — although, Hazan notes in her memoir Amarcord: Marcella Remembers, he didn’t spend much time writing. Instead, he read and ate and wandered. On their early dates, she was bewildered by his food obsession, which fueled much of their conversation. Nonetheless, she married him. Shortly afterward, they moved to New York so he could help run his family’s fur business. She had no job, no friends, no family, and no English. Victor handed her his old copy of Il Talismana della Felicità, a cookbook by the Italian chef Ada Boni, and suggested she learn how to cook.

Much to her surprise, she took to it almost immediately. “My taste memories were being released,” she wrote in Amarcord, “and attached to them, mysteriously, was an intuitive understanding of how to produce those tastes. Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed; it came as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak.”

Maybe this is because, for a person from Cesenatico, being indifferent to food is like being a fish indifferent to water. All food was good: the panini Hazan and her friends would take to the beach, the saraghine, a type of sprat that the fishermen would grill fresh off the boat and suck off the bones col bacio, “with a kiss,” and even the meals Hazan’s parents scraped together during World War II when they fled to a primitive unheated farmhouse further inland. The weird thing about Victor was that he wanted to talk about it.

But Hazan didn’t cook to imagine herself back home in Italy. What brought her joy was cooking for Victor specifically. Every evening, they tasted whatever she had prepared for dinner together. “When my efforts proved to be especially triumphant,” she wrote, “he would leap out of his chair and throw his arms around me.” Everything she made was calibrated for his palate. And he never missed an opportunity to praise her or to make sure the world knew who she was.

In 1969, somewhat by accident, Hazan began teaching an Italian cooking class in her apartment. (The class was originally Chinese cooking and Hazan was a student, but the teacher left and the other students demanded that Hazan teach them how to cook Italian.) A few weeks into the classes, the New York Times ran a list of local cooking schools. Victor called to suggest that Hazan’s class be added. He was told it was too late, but shortly afterward, Craig Claiborne, then the Times food editor, called and invited himself to lunch, which the Hazans always ate together, Italian-style. In due course, a profile appeared in the paper, and the cookbook editors came calling.

Hazan turned her first offer of a book deal down flat. She had a strong command of the language of food, but her English, acquired in part by watching Brooklyn Dodgers games on TV (after Victor had explained the rules of baseball), was still shaky. She didn’t even like to talk on the phone. But Victor intervened. He would be her translator! And thus “Marcella Hazan” was born.

Victor did more than translate. Hazan’s method was to cook by instinct and jot things down in Italian. He went through her notes and pointed out steps that were missing and reminded her to use exact quantities. Once her notes were complete to Victor’s satisfaction, he would type them up in English and add brief headnotes about Italian food culture. Hazan always referred to their manuscripts in the first person plural possessive — “ours” — though her name was the only one on the cover.

How did this collaboration work in practice? Did Hazan ever get fed up with Victor’s nit-picking? Did Victor, like Paul Child, ever simmer with resentment over being “the husband”? In Amarcord, which Kim Severson described as “her memoir, written by him in her voice,” she (he?) writes that the writing process was “sometimes infuriating.” This seems like a deliberate understatement. As does the description of them fighting often, “sometimes wrathfully.” Victor did not simmer. He boiled. Nonetheless, to outsiders, the couple always presented a united front, and together, over the course of seven cookbooks and one memoir, went through multiple publishers and editors (including Judith Jones) who they did not feel treated their work with the respect it was due.

Perhaps the true nature of their dynamic can be found in a comment Victor made to the Times following Hazan’s death, and the end of their 58-year marriage: “A lot of people had encounters with her because she knew in her mind, in her heart, exactly how things were supposed to be. That is what made her cooking great. Marcella wasn’t easy, but she was true. She made no compromises with herself, with her work, or with her people.”

Victor understood this and accepted it, just Hazan accepted his need to be appreciated and his unshakeable faith in his own judgment. Is that not the most — or maybe the least? — anyone can expect out of a marriage? The cookbooks were a bonus. (And don’t feel too bad for Victor; he also published two books about wine under his own name.)

Essentials is exactly how the Hazans thought Italian cooking should be. There are no Italian-American red sauce classics here, no chicken Parm or baked ziti, not even that much garlic. Italian cuisine, Hazan explains at the outset, is really many cuisines: The country of Italy as we know it didn’t exist until 1871. This was about 50 years before Hazan was born, still relatively recent history. People and food didn’t move around very much. Hazan herself, a northerner, didn’t taste Sicilian or Neapolitan cooking until she moved to New York. But these cuisines have two essential characteristics in common. First, Hazan writes in her introduction, they are all “la cucina di casa,” homestyle. Italians don’t believe in haute cuisine. Second, Italian cuisine is architectural: Flavors “build up from the bottom” with each added ingredient. An improperly sauteed onion at the foundation — the soffritto — will destroy the entire dish.

Hazan does make a few concessions to modern American life. Factory-made pasta is absolutely fine. Sometimes it’s even better than fine, she writes, and people who refuse it on some misguided principle are really missing out. If you don’t have time to make a proper brodo (which is not the same as a French stock), it’s okay to use a canned broth, diluted with water. She suggests suitable substitutes for Italian ingredients: For peaches and strawberries in white wine sauce, she replaces the peaches with mangoes because a really good fresh peach is hard to find. But if you take the time to do things the old-fashioned way, like, say, developing the skill to roll out pasta by hand, you will be richly rewarded with an incomparable texture. (The steps in this process are described as “movements,” like a symphony.)

Everyone who writes about Essentials gets very excited about the tomato sauce with onion and butter. That’s because it’s just tomatoes, an onion, and butter, plus some salt, simmered for 45 minutes or so. It’s practically idiot-proof, only slightly more effort than heating up a jar of Ragú, and it tastes like you worked much harder than you did. The roast chicken with lemons is similarly simple and delicious and is said to inspire marriage proposals although, ironically, Victor hated chicken and refused to eat it.

I, too, have experienced the magic of the tomato sauce with onion and butter, but I wanted a challenge, so I tried the ragù alla Bolognese. It has to simmer on the stove for at least three hours, five if you can swing it. There’s also a lot of chopping and stirring involved. This made me feel like a real cook, like I was building something. It tasted appropriately complex, as though time had blended all the ingredients together until they were indistinguishable.

Maybe this is a metaphor for Marcella and Victor Hazan. Though somehow I think they would find the notion of Bolognese as a metaphor for their partnership ridiculous. They would probably prefer something more direct. So how about this: Everyone has the capacity to make great food, Italian-style. Marcella Hazan made sure we knew how to do it, and Victor Hazan made sure she was heard.

Aimee Levitt is a freelance writer in Chicago. Read more of her work at aimeelevitt.com.