Americans already thought they were in love with Italian food in 1973 when Hazan’s first book, “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” came out. What they were in love with was, in fact, the product of a mass migration of Italians who, more often than not, came from Campania, Sicily and other Southern regions. Many were fleeing the desperate rural poverty of tenant farms run under almost feudal conditions. Others were tradespeople with no formal education. Their marinaras, meatballs and lasagnas had evolved in their new country, but the roots were southern.
This world was not the Hazans’. Victor and Marcella were well-off northerners, from Romagna. Victor’s mother and father were Sephardic Jews who owned fur stores. When they left Italy, they were escaping, not poverty, but fascist antisemitism. Marcella’s parents were landowners whose tenant farmers paid a share of their earnings and brought them traditional tributes of chickens and rabbits when major holidays came around. Marcella was sent to universities in Padua and Ferrara, where she earned two doctorates in natural sciences.
Most of the recipes in “The Classic Italian Cookbook” were Northern Italian, too: roast lamb with juniper berries from Lombardy, Bolognese ragu with milk and nutmeg; minestrone in the style of Emilia-Romagna. She jotted them down in Italian, the only language she spoke when she moved to New York. Victor, her uncredited ghost writer, translated them into English along with introductions stating his wife’s rigorous views on seasonality and simplicity. The style the couple hit on was stately, controlled, literary, erudite. It made allusions to Picasso and Aristotle. Above all, it was suffused with a belief that Italian cuisine was one of civilization’s great achievements.
“Nothing significant exists under Italy’s sun that is not touched by art,” that first book proclaims. “Its food is twice blessed because it is the product of two arts, the art of cooking and the art of eating.”
This was not the kind of message Americans were accustomed to hearing when they sat down to eat spaghetti by the flame of a candle stuck in a Chianti bottle while Dean Martin compared the moon in your eye to a big pizza pie. But by 1973, Italy’s image abroad had changed. It was now a beacon of style and the arts, the land of Fellini and Antonioni, Pucci and Valentino, Ferrari and Alfa Romeo. So when the Hazans came along selling the idea that Italy had also figured out a few things about good food that added up to a collective body of knowledge — in other words, culture — readers were ready to pay attention.
After her first cookbook, Hazan began collecting recipes around Italy, and she gave the food of the south its due. But she never warmed up to Italian American food, sniffing at its limp pasta, overcooked tomato sauces and heavy hand with garlic. Readers who were devoted to chicken scarpariello would come to see it and dishes like it as weird, bastardized aberrations. That is one of her legacies, too, for better or worse. When Carbone charges $94 for veal parm, some people seem to think it’s a scam. When Nello, a Northern Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, charges $89 for veal Milanese, they just say it’s expensive.
It’s hard to imagine a recipe writer today changing the way a whole country thinks as thoroughly as Hazan did. Book contracts go to influencers whose advances are determined by their number of followers. Hazan didn’t have followers. She had disciples.
She still does. Peter Miller, who directed, produced and wrote “Marcella,” said almost all of the money for the film came from donations from hundreds of her fans.
“Everybody who gave money gave money because they love Marcella,” Miller said. “It’s not a sensible way to fund a film, and it took a really long time, but I ended up building this whole network of people who knew her.”
The contributions were more than financial. Donors shared memories and photographs of Hazan that made their way into the documentary. One suggested that Miller talk to Shola Olunloyo, a Nigerian-born chef in Philadelphia whose first non-African cookbook was one by Hazan. From it, he learned Bolognese her way, and has been making it about once a week for two decades.
In another scene, New York chef April Bloomfield cooks Hazan’s radically easy recipe for tomato sauce that bubbles away with butter and an onion that you fish out at the end, like a bay leaf. After tasting it, Bloomfield looks up to the sky.
“Marcella, I hope you’re happy,” she says. “I hope I did a good job.”
If you own one of Hazan’s cookbooks, you know the feeling.
Marcella Hazan’s Bolognese Sauce
Makes 4 servings
After the death in 2013 of Marcella Hazan, the cookbook author who changed the way Americans cook Italian food, The New York Times asked readers which of her recipes had become staples in their kitchens. Many people answered with one word: “Bolognese.” Hazan had a few recipes for the classic sauce, and they are all outstanding. This one appeared in her book “Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking,” and one reader called it “the gold standard.” Try it and see for yourself.
2 cups tomatoes, in addition to their juices (for example, a 28-ounce can of San Marzano whole peeled tomatoes)
5 tablespoons butter
1 onion, peeled and cut in half
Salt
Combine the tomatoes, their juices, the butter and the onion halves in a saucepan. Add a pinch or two of salt.
Place over medium heat and bring to a simmer. Cook, uncovered, for about 45 minutes. Stir occasionally, mashing any large pieces of tomato with a spoon. Add salt as needed.
Discard the onion before tossing the sauce with pasta. This recipe makes enough sauce for a pound of pasta.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.