Born: 15 April 1924, Italy
Died: 29 September 2013
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Marcella Polini
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40. For more on her story, check out Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America.
Interestingly, it was also Chinese food that would start Marcella Hazan, “a legend of Italian cooking” on the path that made her famous. Born in 1924, she came of age during World War II in Italy and studied biology and natural sciences at the University of Ferrara, intending to become a teacher. Meeting her future husband in the 1950s spurred her to improve her cooking skills, and not only because food was a passion of his. The couple moved to New York after marrying in 1955 and she was appalled by the culinary culture shock. As Sen observes, “There was only one way for Hazan to survive in this country: learn to cook.”
Using Il talismano della felicità (The Talisman of Happiness), she slowly built up her skills “as words come to a child when it is time for her to speak,” she wrote in her memoir, Amarcord. Eventually, she enrolled in a Chinese cooking class, where curious students convinced Hazan to teach them about Italian food. And so, in 1969, she began offering classes once a week from their Manhattan apartment. By the following year, she’d come to the attention of Craig Claiborne, the food editor of The New York Times, and his half-page story brought her a flood of new students. A year later, she was asked by the publisher Harper & Row to write a cookbook. Like Chao’s, Hazan’s husband offered to help translate—unlike Chao’s, he was actually helpful. Released in 1973, The Classic Italian Cook Book contained 250 recipes from the Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany regions of northern Italy; it was later reissued by Knopf in 1976. “The first useful thing to know about Italian cooking is that, as such, it actually doesn’t exist,” she wrote in the introduction. “The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and usually hostile states.”
Knopf also released Hazan’s second book, More Classic Italian Cooking in 1978. She became so popular that the famed department store Bloomingdale’s created a boutique section in its 59th Street store named Marcella Hazan’s Italian Kitchen and stocked with her homemade pasta Bolognese and extra-virgin olive oil from Tuscany. Her $650,000 advance from HarperCollins for 1997’s Marcella Cucina was record-breaking, more than any other American cookbook at the time. Long after her 2013 death, her legacy lives on in the recipes that younger generations of cooks continue to live—and eat—by.