TRANSCRIPT
– I think we all tend to understate how powerful first time discovery is of things.
When I grew up, we didn’t have extra virgin olive oil, we didn’t have arugula, we didn’t have radicchio, we didn’t have every kind of pasta shape under the sun.
– Nobody’d heard of sun-dried tomatoes until Marcella Hazan.
I remember my mother using olive oil and it was sort of something that you would put on your skin when you went in the sun.
– It was only one olive oil in America and it was not extra virgin and was terrible.
– Nobody knew what extra virgin olive oil was and how much better it tasted than what we were used to.
– [Marcella] And we season with extra virgin olive oil.
– Always the extra virgin.
– Yes.
It is the only, the only olive oil is extra virgin.
– Okay.
– Let’s go- (audience laughing) – Look who she’s talking to, that’s right.
– One ingredient after the other, she brought it to America.
– Marcella introduced balsamic vinegar to us.
I think it is something that she lived to regret.
She would use it as a drop of beautiful seasoning, of flavor.
It was valuable and precious, and now anywhere you go you ask for a vinegarette and you have balsamic vinegar.
I remember going to dinner with her and she would cringe with the fact that people served it everywhere.