To American cooks, she is simply Marcella. This first-name familiarity, however, is less a reflection of her personal style than of the devotion of the million-plus American cooks who, through her books, have invited her into their kitchens. Marcella Hazan, the woman who transformed America's taste for Italian food, is unassailably serious about her life's work, which has been to teach American cooks the hows and whys of authentic Italian cooking.
The title of her fifth book, Marcella Cucina, translates as "Marcella cooks." HarperCollins, which acquired the book for $650,000, the most ever paid for a cookbook, shipped 150,000 copies to bookstores last month. A BOMC main selection currently being featured in newspaper food pages across the country, Marcella Cucina is also her last book, the author has declared inarguably. Booksellers, radio and TV talk-show hosts have filled her dance card to the margins during a two month-long coast-to-coast promotional tour. When that tour is over, Marcella and her husband, Victor, for 42 years her partner, arbiter, translator and inspiration (the dedication to Marcella Cucina reads "For, and because of, Victor") will retire to their condominium on the west coast of Florida.
PW visits the Hazans at their suite in the Beekman Towers, a venerable Manhattan hotel, at the beginning of the tour. Marcella, a short, round woman with silvery gray hair and the no-nonsense air of a formidable grandmother, is wearing a green knit dress and the same long double strand of pearls that she sports in the photo on the cover of the new book. The previous night, at an event in the Connecticut suburbs that drew 300 people, nearly all of whom bought copies of the just released book and stood in long lines for signing, she apologized for the cold that affected her delivery. But even in the small hotel sitting room this morning, her voice is deep and gravelly. Next to her are a box of tissues for her sniffles and a frequently tapped pack of ultra-thin cigarettes.
Despite the hoopla, the limousines, the media hype, the hard work and the success, Marcella reminds you of one of her own recipes-direct, simple (not always easy) and authentic. While gracious, she greets a visitor with an old-world distance, suggesting that, on the topic of cooking, she is more comfortable-and eloquent-in deed than in word: she has had her say in the kitchen. This morning's conversation, in which Victor is a ready and articulate participant, makes clear the depth of this couple's long partnership, which is so appealing a subtext of Marcella Cucina.
"I had never cooked until I married," Marcella says. Born in 1924, in the town of Cesenatico on the Adriatic Sea, she spent most of her early life studying. A biochemist with two doctorates, she was teaching when she met Victor. Shortly after their marriage in 1955, they moved to Manhattan, where Victor worked in his father's furrier business and Marcella got a job researching gum disease with the Guggenheim Institute for Research.
"Victor took me to the supermarket, where I could buy things without speaking English. To me the food was in coffins, trapped. But I learned to cook here. It was not easy, you understand, but it was a connection to Italy."
"Marcella took naturally to cooking," Victor interjects. "It was instinctive for her."
"I was always in the mouth, I think," Marcella adds, with her first smile.
In a few years, their family included a son, Giuliano, now a cooking teacher and the author of a book on pasta; recently married, he lives in Florida. Marcella quit working in the lab near the end of her pregnancy and, at home during the day, was able to cook lunch as well as dinner. These years of preparing traditional Italian meals for her family established the foundation of her culinary skills, but her career as a teacher of Italian cuisine actually began when she was taking a Chinese cooking class in Manhattan, where her classmates, hearing her speak of her own efforts in the kitchen, urged her to teach a course in Italian cuisine. She did, and enjoyed it. A few years later, in 1970, Victor wrote to the New York Times, hoping to have her class included in its schedule of cooking schools. "But the list was already published by the time they received the notice," Marcella says. "I thought, 'Well, there's the end of that career.'"
Within a few weeks, Craig Claiborne, the Times food writer, called her. "He said he wanted to come over the next day at 12:30 to talk about the class. I said we have lunch every day at 12:30. If you want to come then, you have to come for lunch."
Claiborne accepted the invitation and visited the Hazans in their apartment, which is where Marcella held her classes. "I think he did not know what to think of this family where the husband rode his bike from the office to eat lunch at home every day. Then he published a beautiful article with recipes of things he ate and saying that I was teaching, and that was the beginning of everything."
Soon there was another phone call. "When you don't know the language, the telephone is a monster," Marcella continues. "I thought he said he was from Harpers Bazaar. I didn't know what he wanted, so I invited him for dinner." The visitor proved to be Peter Mollman, an editor at Harper's Magazine Press, who persuaded Marcella to write her first cookbook.
"I would go to work during the day and at night come home to type out the translations of the recipes," says Victor, describing the teamwork that has served them so well ever since.
The endpapers for Marcella Cucina are reproductions of the notebooks in which she writes her recipes, in Italian. The English belongs to Victor, who has published one book on wine and will write another for Farrar Straus &Giroux in the year 2000. The introduction and chapter essays of this last book are written in particularly graceful prose, but that, too, is a collaboration. "Marcella writes what she wants to say; I translate. We go over it together."
"Victor," Marcella is quick to point out, "does not take me out of the page and put himself in. My students say when they read my books, it is like listening to me."
In 1973, Harper's Magazine Press published The Classic Italian Cook Book. Success, says Victor, came despite the fact that the publisher "did not capitalize on the extraordinary reception that the book had had with the press. They did a very poor job of promoting and distributing it." British rights were sold to W.H. Allen, which published the book there with no changes (not even conversion to the metric system) and no promotion. Once again, Marcella had reason to believe that her career, this time as a cookbook author, was over.
"Then Julia Child came for lunch," Marcella takes up. "She suggested that I meet her editor at Knopf, Judith Jones. When we met, Judith said she wanted to publish my next book. When we signed the contract for More Classic Italian Cooking, she decided to buy the rights to the first book, which was very unusual."
The Italian Vogue
When Knopf reissued Classic in 1976 with a new jacket, the enthusiasm that Marcella had generated in the press was picked up by cooks nationwide, whose palates, having been awakened by the likes of Julia Child and James Beard, were primed to give up canned spaghetti for pasta as it was meant to be. The book went back to press for 28 printings. A similar situation prevailed in England, where Macmillan acquired the rights, made the appropriate revisions and sold the book well. "In my library," Marcella adds, "I have four different first books."
It was Jones who suggested the Hazans ought to have an agent and introduced them to Bob and Susan Lescher, who still represent them.
When More Classic Italian Cooking was published by Knopf in 1978, the Hazans had moved the cooking course to Italy and Marcella's reputation was burgeoning.
"We had the good fortune in Bologna to encounter one of the few Italian bureaucrats with a little bit of vision," Victor recalls. "He was the head of the tourist board and understood that our classes could help make of Bologna, which had long been a huge convention center, a tourist attraction as well. He arranged with a big hotel to give us kitchen space for 10 years. The city built a kitchen there for our use, at no cost to us."
Italian cuisine had grabbed attention in the States, and by the early 1980s Marcella's enlarged classes, 28 people instead of six, were soon booked years in advance and always had waiting lists. Victor, now in advertising, gave up his day job to devote all his time to running the school. Thus the audience was there when Knopf brought out the next book, Marcella's Italian Kitchen, in 1986.
"By that time, I had been teaching for 20 years," Marcella recalls. "Ingredients in America had changed completely and caught up to taste, and I had learned more of what was important to the reader." During these years, they moved their school to the 16th-century home they bought in Venice, where, with classes scaled down again, the waiting lists lengthened.
"Marcella already had thought about rewriting the recipes in her first two books," Victor continues, "and combining them into one encyclopedic volume, a permanent reference with some new recipes. We took the idea to Judith, but she and Jane Friedman [then a senior v-p at Knopf] were more interested in a new book, a big picture book of traveling through Italy. Eventually, we struck a bargain and signed for two books, the one we wanted and then theirs."
Victor then describes a sequence of events which, in hindsight at least, demonstrates a not uncommon publishing phenomenon. Essentials of Italian Cooking, the volume combining rewritten recipes from the first two books with about 50 new ones and published in the fall of 1992, was an entirely different entity in the eyes of the Hazans than it was to its publisher. "It was presented to the salesmen as a reissue," Victor recalls. "They told us there would be no advertising budget, a first printing of 15,000 and a tour of, I think, four cities. All of that notwithstanding, the books were sold out the first week. There were four small printings before Christmas and in January a fifth printing of 25,000."
"People would write that they wanted the book but could not find it," adds Marcella. "We were having a lot of disagreeable meetings. It was a very difficult and painful period."
The following spring, Victor reports, "we got a call from someone on the James Beard Awards committee asking where this book was. When I called Judith, she said she felt she could not submit it in good faith because it had a lot of old material in it."
To the Hazans, the collection with 50 new recipes and previous ones revised to reduce fat content and take into account the greater availability in the U.S. of more produce and foodstuffs, was a new work. The James Beard judges apparently agreed. Having been submitted by the Hazans, Essentials of Italian Cooking won the 1992 James Beard Award for Best Italian Cookbook.
And that was when we decided that we would move," interjects Victor. "Knopf was agreeable and generously released us from our contract. We returned the advance for the second book."
Proposals for Marcella's next book were offered by the Leschers to a number of publishers, with the field of suitors narrowing finally to two: HarperCollins, represented by cookbook editor Susan Friedland, and William Morrow in the person of editor Maria Guarnaschelli.
"Susan and Maria both came to Venice to woo us," Marcella notes. The bidding that went back and forth a number of times before HarperCollins made its winning offer. Remarkably, Marcella, who became an American citizen 10 years ago, is not published in Italy. She has been translated into Dutch, German and, for Brazil, Portuguese, but in her native land, she is not a recognized authority. Of course, the news she preaches isn't news there. Arguably, the unquestioned popularity of Italian cooking in the U.S. at the end of this century is due in very large measure to the efforts of Marcella and Victor Hazan. And the hundreds of bookbuyers who attend each stop along her tour attest to the success of her distinctive contribution to American cuisine.
