Marcella Hazan, 1924–2013

Marcella Hazan made America fall in love with authentic Italian food. The recipes in her six best-selling cookbooks were traditional, tasty, and minimal—her famous tomato sauce contained only tomatoes, an onion, butter, and salt—and far removed from the cheese-coated, overboiled pasta that once passed as Italian cuisine in America. She urged home cooks to use more salt, once writing that any reader worried about salt shortening their life expectancy “need not read any further.” On the subject of garlic, she was particularly dogmatic. “The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking,” she said. “It must remain a shadowy background presence. It cannot take over the show.”

When she was growing up in a small Italian fishing village on the Adriatic Sea, “Hazan showed no interest in the kitchen,” said the Los Angeles Times. She trained as a scientist, earning two doctorates, in biology and natural sciences, at the University of Ferrara. But in 1955 she married Victor Hazan, a food-loving Italian Jew who had earlier lived in the U.S. with his family. The couple relocated to New York City and, eager to please Victor, Hazan began honing her cooking skills. “Cooking came to me as though it had been there all along, waiting to be expressed,” she wrote in her memoir.

Hazan enrolled in classes given by Grace Chu—who introduced many Americans to fine Chinese cooking—and her fellow students were soon urging her to teach them Italian cooking. “Her classes, held in her Manhattan apartment, caught the attention of Craig Claiborne, then the food editor of The New York Times, who in 1970 came to one of the Hazans’ daily lunches,” said the Times. She served a feast of tortellini with Swiss chard filling, spaghetti with eggplant, and artichokes Roman style. Claiborne included the recipes in a story headlined “There Was a Time She Couldn’t Cook,” and aspiring chefs began making pilgrimages to the Hazans’ apartment and later to their schools in Bologna and Venice.

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Inspired by the success of her classes, Hazan started work on her first book, The Classic Italian Cookbook, which came out in 1973. She cooked and recooked every dish, carefully gauging Victor’s reaction. When she was finally happy with the recipes, she wrote them out in longhand in Italian, “relying on Victor to translate them into English and get them ready for print,” said CSMonitor.com.

The couple retired in the late 1990s, and Hazan’s last days were spent in a condo on Florida’s Gulf Coast, occasionally entertaining fans, students, and food writers. Victor told the Times that the family would take her ashes to her beloved home village of Cesenatico for a simple ceremony. “Marcella was always very distressed when she would read complicated chefs’ recipes,” he said. “She would just say, ‘Why not make it simple?’ So the sentiment holds. We will make it simple.”