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Recollections Of A Savory Life

Tribune photo by JEFF HOUCK

Victor Hazan, left, mixes pappardelle noodles together with Bolognese sauce as his wife, Marcella Hazan, right, sprinkles Parmesan cheese.

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By JEFF HOUCK

The Tampa Tribune

Published: August 26, 2008

Updated:

LONGBOAT KEY - The phone in the kitchen is ringing. This is not a good thing.

"Who could be calling?" grumbles Marcella Hazan.

She and her husband, Victor, have a visitor for lunch. They are a few moments away from sitting down to eat their main meal of the day. Their large, white enamel serving plates are in the oven - "We're obsessed about using warm plates," Victor says while slipping his hands into heat-resistant kitchen gloves.

Her homemade pappardelle noodles are somersaulting in boiling water and are near ready to be married in a bowl with her legendary classic Bolognese ragu. A simple yet elegant salad of Italian greens waits in the refrigerator. A Semifreddo al Torrone e Cioccolato is on the menu for dessert. Now this.

Hazan picks up the phone.

"Can you call me later?" she says in her heavy accent. "I just put the pasta in the water to cook."

She puts the phone back on the wall. She puffs her cheeks in disgust.

"Who was that?" Victor asks.

"Green? Green ...?" she says. "A woman I don't know, Victor."

The thing they never get used to when living in America, he explains, is that people always call when you're going to the table.

"You would think that an Italian would know not to call at this hour," she says in a low growl.

For the Hazans, there is a sacramental quality to the noontime ritual, known in Italy as il pranzo. Factories, stores and offices close so that everyone can gather for the most important meal of the day.

In every place they lived together during the first 44 years of their marriage - Rome, Milan, New York, Venice - the Hazans insisted on residing close enough to Victor's work that he could come home at lunchtime. During their eight retirement years in Longboat, they have continued the tradition of eating lunch at home together.

Lunch has special significance for her beyond the ritual: It was a lunchtime meal she cooked almost 38 years ago for New York food writer Craig Claiborne that propelled her at age 45 into becoming an icon of Italian cooking in the United States.

The day his story about Hazan and the Italian cooking classes she was teaching in her Brooklyn home ran - Oct. 15, 1970 - changed her life forever. Classes swelled, celebrities dropped by and a series of classic cookbooks resulted.

"I have never since then had to be concerned about how to occupy my time," she writes in her new memoir, "Amarcord: Marcella Remembers," which will be released by Gotham books in early October. The book is an intimate tour through her life, from her birth in Egypt to her family's move to the coastal Italian town of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna, her marriage to Victor, an accidental teaching career and her eventual culinary fame.

Victor monitors the pasta, takes a piece out with what looks like giant tweezers and hands it to his wife on a small tray for it to cool. She tastes, chews and nods that it is done.

He transfers the pasta from the pot to a bowl and begins to pour the Bolognese over it from a saute pan. Noodles and sauce mingle until there is a balance.

"This is our soul food," Victor says as he brings it to the table for serving.

'You Pass Through Different Moods'

The recipe for the dish they are serving was included in "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking," one of the six award-winning cookbooks Marcella Hazan has written since 1973. The memoir, the title of which translates in the Romagnolo dialect as "I remember," was a much more difficult book to write than a cookbook.

"It was strange to write it because, you know, memory is a tricky thing," she says.

Each of her cookbooks took at least five years to write. This book took about two years, including sifting through hundreds of family photos. She dictated the text, as always, in Italian to Victor, who then translated longhand on legal pads. She confesses in the book that although she tried to remember her life chronologically, it isn't always possible.

"One thing makes you remember another thing that maybe you forgot. So you pass through different moods," she explains while smoking a Marlboro Light before lunch. A cigarette is rarely missing from her fingertips.

Particularly painful was recalling the events surrounding how she broke her right arm at age 7 during a day at the beach in Alexandria, Egypt, where her family was living at the time. After gangrene set in, doctors suggested to her mother, Maria Polini, that the arm be amputated. Her mother instead found a surgeon in Bologna, Italy, who saved the arm. After several operations, though, her right hand clenched in a clawlike curl that remains to this day.

Fighting that disfigurement would become a motivation for her the rest of her life. For every taunt by other children, Hazan would strive to show them that she could do everything they could, if not more.

The family eventually settled in Cesenatico, a seaside town on Italy's east coast known for its seafood industry. The fresh ingredients of that region and the memories of fishing crews dining on grilled saraghine fish at the docks left an indelible culinary imprint on her. The family suffered through World War II, barely surviving bombings by Allied forces and food confiscations by Nazi soldiers. Her mother once braved a military curfew to borrow olive oil from neighbors.

"Some things you remember you almost cry about, and other times you laugh," she says. "Other things make me think, 'I can't believe I was able to do these things.' Many, many different emotions."

With an innate curiosity about nature, Marcella excelled in school and went on to earn her doctorate in natural sciences at the University of Ferrara. In 1956, she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-American whose family was in the fur trade. He later became a wine writer, and the couple moved to New York City later that year.

Her new husband was a great appreciator of food but did not cook. Neither did Marcella. Feeding him forced her to learn. She would depend on advice from family and friends to catch up by cooking recipes that were native to Cesenatico.

It wasn't easy. Being a housewife after years of studying for her degree did not suit her. Speaking in broken English also didn't help. While shopping one day, she returned home with two pounds of ginger. She thought she was buying artichokes.

"Back then, you could not find simple things we would cook with like fresh herbs, even in New York City," she says.

An Important Lunch

The family moved back and forth between the United States and Italy before settling back in New York in the early 1960s. Marcella juggled her responsibilities as a wife and new mother to a baby son, Giuliano.

To vary her repertoire, she would take cooking classes. At the behest of her father-in-law, Marcella signed up to learn Chinese cooking from Grace Chu, better known as Madame Chu. When Chu canceled the first session, Marcella's fellow pupils searched for another option. At the urging of a classmate, she began teaching Italian cooking techniques in her tiny apartment in October 1969.

After she had been teaching for almost a year, Victor wrote to the New York Times to ask it to add the class to its weekly list of cooking events. The paper said the list was closed, but a few weeks later, a stranger called from the Times wanting to interview her about the class.

At lunch that day, Victor asked her if anything new had happened. Marcella replied that someone named Grec or Greg had called from the Times. She didn't remember his name but invited him to join the couple for lunch.

"Could it have been Craig Claiborne?" he asked.

"That's it," she said.

"He's the most famous food writer in America," Victor said.

She decided to serve a complete Italian meal, with appetizer, two courses, salad and dessert. For the appetizer, she made Carciofi alla Romana, artichokes served upside down with their stems pointed up. Her first course was Tortelloni di Bieta e Ricotta, a hand-rolled pasta shaped into tortelloni and stuffed with Swiss chard and ricotta. The second course was Rollatini di Vitello, veal rolls stuffed with pancetta and Parmesan cheese. The salad was raw finocchio sliced thin and seasoned with salt, olive oil and black pepper. To keep the lunch relatively light, she served a fruit bowl of cold, marinated orange slices.

Claiborne's story about the meal created a stampede of students and led to a book deal. Movie stars such as Danny Kaye and Burt Lancaster followed as she moved from teaching in her home to classrooms in Venice, Italy, and other locations around the world. She would go on to win lifetime achievement awards from the James Beard Foundation and the International Association of Culinary Professionals, as well as a Knight of the Star award of merit in Italy for her contributions to the Italian republic.

All because of one lunch.

"Nearly 40 years have passed, but I don't think I can improve on it," she writes about Claiborne's meal in "Amarcord."

Marcella learned to cook through absorption, not formal training. She has never run a restaurant, but the cooking classes she taught, which were full of authentic Italian home cooking, are the stuff of legend.

"The way she ran the classes, you were learning about the products, dining out in the country, meeting the artisans," remembers Lynne Rosetto Kasper, author of "The Splendid Table" cookbook and host of the public radio show of the same name.

Marcella's friend, the writer James Beard, attended that same class. "She essentially introduced me to the region that became the start of my career," Kasper says. "It was the planting of that seed that led me to do 10 years of research on that book and to fall in love with that region."

Coffee And Cigarettes

In Longboat Key, Marcella launches a question at her visitor.

"Tell me one thing," she says. "What is it this fashion, of talking always about chefs, chefs, chefs? Why do they not talk much more about the food cooked in Italy at home? The dishes that the chef does very seldom can be reproduced at home. Why did chefs become so famous?"

"I think Julia is the key," Victor says. That would be their friend Julia Child. The couple knew Child and her husband, Paul. Julia loved chefs. The way the couple see it, her elevation of chefs' status on television led to today's celebrity chef phenomenon.

"Remember, Julia's show wasn't called 'The French Cook At Home,'" the visitor says. "It was 'The French Chef.'"

Marcella nods.

She says she has asked her neighbors how often they eat out. "Not very often," they told her. How often was not often? "About four or five times a week, but not all week." The implication of that phenomenon boggles Marcella.

"When is the only time the family is together? It's at the table," she says. "Aside from eating well and being more conscious about the food they are eating, it's more healthy to know how they are doing and what is in their life. It is very important, and yet they don't do it."

After serving the salad and then a delicious, melty-yet-still-frozen semifreddo, she lights another cigarette and turns her thoughts to the book tour. At 84 and with several health issues for her and Victor to deal with, she had to be coaxed into doing one. She agreed to it only after her publisher found her a portable espresso machine to take on the road. She wanders from the table to the kitchen and brings back a Delonghi Esclusivo Alicia Electric Moka Espresso. She takes a drag on her Marlboro Light, dreading the eventual flight to San Francisco. It doesn't help that she's claustrophobic.

"On the West Coast, it's terrible," she says. "I say to my husband, I try to figure out when I can smoke.

"Leaving the house, going in the limousine, I can't smoke. At the airport, I can't smoke. In the plane, I can't smoke. When I arrive in San Francisco, at the airport, I can't smoke. There's a car there waiting for me, I can't smoke. At the hotel, I can't smoke. When am I going to smoke? Americans do everything to extreme."

BOLOGNESE MEAT SAUCE

1 tablespoon vegetable oil (Hazan uses olive oil)

3 tablespoons butter, plus 1 tablespoon for tossing the pasta

1/2 cup chopped onion

2/3 cup chopped celery

2/3 cup chopped carrot

3/4 pound ground beef chuck

1 cup whole milk

1/8 teaspoon grated nutmeg

1 cup dry white wine

1 1/2 cup canned Italian plum tomatoes, cut in with their juice

Salt

Pepper

Freshly grated Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese

Put oil and butter in a pot with chopped onion. Turn heat on to medium. Cook and stir onion until translucent. Add chopped celery and carrot. Cook for 2 minutes more, stirring the vegetables to coat them well.

Add ground beef, a large pinch of salt, and a few grindings of pepper. Break up the meat and stir well, cooking until the beef has lost its raw, red color.

Add the milk and let simmer gently, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. This can take a while. Add the 1/8 teaspoon of grated nutmeg and stir.

Add the wine and let simmer until it has evaporated. This can take a while. Add tomatoes and stir thoroughly to coat all ingredients. When the tomatoes begin to bubble, turn heat down so that the sauce cooks at the laziest simmer with occasional bubbles breaking. Cook uncovered for 3 hours or more, stirring from time to time. If the sauce begins to dry out and the fat separates from the meat, add 1/2 cup of water to keep it from sticking to the pot. At the end, however, no water should remain and the fat must be separate from the sauce. Taste and correct for salt.

To serve: toss with 1 1/4 pound of cooked, drained pasta, adding the final tablespoon of butter. Serve with the parmesan on the side.

Note: Use 1 part pork to 2 parts beef for a more flavorful sauce. The more marbled the beef, the sweeter the sauce will be. Pasta of choice is tagliatelle, but it works equally well with rigatoni, fusilli and conchiglie.

SEMIFREDDO AL TORRONE E CIOCCOLATO

6 ounces hard Italian nougat, torrone, with almonds

6 eggs

6 tablespoons sugar

2 cups heavy whipping cream

1/2 cup bittersweet or semisweet chocolate fragmented into small pieces

1 tablespoon dark rum

A 2-quart bowl or slightly larger

A pinch of salt

Use a sturdy chopping knife to cut the nougat into small pieces, then grind it to a granular consistency in the food processor.

Separate the eggs, keeping only four of the whites.

Pour the yolks into a mixing bowl, adding all the sugar. Whip them until they form a foamy mass.

In another bowl, preferably a chilled steel one, whip the cream until it is quite stiff.

Add the whipped cream, the chocolate bits, the rum, and 1 1/4 cup of the ground nougat to the beaten egg yolks, mixing well to distribute all the ingredients uniformly.

In a clean bowl, whip the four reserved egg whites together with a pinch of salt until they form stiff peaks. Fold them gently into the egg yolk, cream, chocolate, and nougat batter.

Sprinkle the remaining pulverized nougat on the inside of the 2-quart bowl, and over it pour the dessert's batter. Pull a sheet of plastic film tightly over the bowl and place it in the freezer. It is ready to be served the following day, but it will keep a full week.

When ready to serve, take the bowl from the freezer and remove the plastic film. Choose a plate with a lip whose inner diameter fits comfortably over the opening of the bowl. Soak a dishtowel in very hot water and wrap it around the bowl. Slide the blade of a long, thin knife inside the bowl to loosen the dessert from its sides. Set the plate upside down over the bowl, hold the bowl and plate firmly together, and give them a good shake. You will feel the dessert come away from the bowl and drop onto the serving plate.

Makes about 8 servings.

Reporter Jeff Houck can be reached at (813) 259-7324 and jhouck@tampatrib.com.

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