Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  We had allotted five days to Kyoto. We stayed ten. If Victor had still been the madcap bachelor I once knew, nothing would have prevented him from cashing in his return plane ticket and staying as long as he could. We took long walks, we spent hours in the temples looking at their gardens, and we shopped. Victor bought some ceramics and loaded up on hand-cut wooden combs. We bought scroll paintings and an eighteenth-century screen painting of a bamboo fence, chrysanthemums, and a misty landscape in the distance that Victor shipped to New York as a gift for his mother. It now takes up the end wall of our living room in Florida.

  We also ate very well, with not a single dull or indifferent dish in all the time we were in Kyoto. The larger part of the thousands of meals that Victor and I have had in our travels have faded to a blur in my memory, and many are altogether beyond recall, but two of the ones we had in Kyoto remain in sharp focus as among the most dazzling of our lives.

  Mark had given Victor an introduction to an antiques dealer from whom he bought a sixth-century Sui dynasty Chinese terra-cotta horse and rider. Upon completion of the transaction, the dealer asked us if we liked tempura, which we assured him we did, and invited us to join him that evening. We met at a small, modern two-story building that bore no indication that it might be a restaurant. He escorted us upstairs to a private room where we found a semicircular counter of brilliant scarlet lacquer. A woman standing behind it presided over copper cauldrons brimming with hot oil. There were three stools, one for each of us. “This is called zashiki tempura,” our host said. “The woman will be cooking only for you, and you must not be in a hurry because she has many things to offer you.” As a qualifier, “many” was hardly adequate. “Limitless” might have been more accurate, but I don’t know for sure because we eventually had to say, “Please stop.” The variety of seafood was startling even for me, who comes from a famous fishing town. Its freshness and flavor, as well as those of the vegetables that were part of the dinner, could not have been surpassed. Each morsel was fried, drained of any drop of fat, and tendered to us by the cook—Victor first, of course—only when we had consumed the previous one. Thus, every bite was at its most desirable point of crispness and heat. It was an ideal rhythm for the enjoyment of fried food. Neapolitans, who also fry formidably well, have described it as frienno e magnanno, which was exactly what we were doing, frying and eating.

  On Victor’s list, there was the name of the restaurant reputed to be Kyoto’s greatest. It was the kind of restaurant, we were to learn, where before you can make a reservation you have to have an introduction. On a day when we had made no other plans, Victor suggested we go there for lunch. We hailed a taxi and gave the driver the address. He looked us over and asked, “Do you have a reservation?” “No,” Victor said. “It’s all right; take us there, please.” It was rather on the outskirts of town, a plain but dignified, low, traditional-looking, wood-and-stone structure. Victor paid the man, but he didn’t drive off; evidently the driver was waiting for us to have to get back into the car and return to where we had come from.

  We rang and a woman in a kimono came to the door. “We would like to have lunch,” Victor said. “What is the name?” “Hazan.” “Do you have a reservation?” “No, but won’t you please accommodate us anyway?” “Oh, I am so sorry.” The Japanese think a flat “no” is impolite, so they rarely say it. They wave their hand in front of their face as though they are brushing away a fly—curiously, it is similar to an Italian gesture that means “you are crazy”—and they say they are sorry, sumimasen. But it was not the last word, as far as Victor was concerned. The woman spoke some English, and using English laced with a few appropriate Japanese words to show that we were not complete barbarians, Victor managed to get her to reconsider. She excused herself and went inside for a few minutes, leaving the door open a crack. When she came back, she opened the door wide to let us in, and we turned to see the taxi drive away.

  We were shown into a large room decorated in Japanese style where the only furnishings were a large five-fold screen painted with a river-and-mountain landscape, a beautiful low lacquer table, and brightly colored silk pillows. We sat down cross-legged at the table. We were the room’s only occupants. A woman in a kimono came and pulled open the shoji screens of the wall in front of us, revealing an exquisite garden beyond. The meal was served one small course at a time, on handsome ceramics and lacquer, each piece unlike any of the others. At one point, our waitress brought in an iron grill no larger than a shoebox, with hot coals below it. On it she placed two small fish the size of smelts or sardines. When they were done, she used her chopsticks to butterfly them and expose the bones, and continuing with only the chopsticks, she fully boned them and recomposed them as though they had never been touched. At first, we responded to each course with lively vocal appreciation of the flavors, so clear and delicious, but eventually, the stillness of the setting, the subdued beauty of the presentation, and the skill and silent grace of our server made us speechless, and we finished the meal in quietude.

  When we next met our police chief friend, he could scarcely believe our exploit. There were only two days remaining for our stay in Kyoto, and he asked what we wanted to do before leaving. “We’d like to visit the Katsura Imperial Villa in the morning,” Victor said. “Certainly,” said the chief. Others subsequently pointed out to us that for a Japanese, a wait of several months to book admittance is not unusual. Katsura is a residential complex of wood buildings erected in the 1600s by a prince of the imperial line. Its spaces, which flow and seem to float, have both a lofty serenity and a close-to-the-earth plainness. It is architecture of consummate refinement, but it prizes informality, and while it exemplifies order, it springs surprises. It’s a house deliberately empty, but not vacant, made to be adorned by the fullness and color of human life. It is not only one of the world’s masterworks of architecture, but an absolute master-work of the human spirit.

  When, after other stops, we left Japan, we felt that we had come on an exploratory visit to the country where, as Victor had dreamed, we might someday live part of our lives. It remained a dream. Twenty years later, when I was on the way to Hong Kong to present a fortnight of Italian cooking at the Mandarin Hotel, we stayed briefly in Tokyo. But the once placid streets were jammed with cars, the affordable little restaurants had become very expensive little restaurants, we saw no men on the street wearing the handsome traditional costume, and only waitresses appeared to be wearing kimonos. It was no longer the same place.

  I probably would not have had a food career to write about if my father-in-law had not been a devotee and favored customer of Pearl’s, a smart uptown Chinese restaurant. Few, if any, among those patrons of Pearl’s from the 1960s who are still around can have forgotten her deft interpretations of Chinese home cooking. I never have. At that time, I wasn’t working, and repeated exposure to Pearl’s repertory prompted me to put some of my abundant free time to good use by learning something about the cuisine. I signed up for a Chinese cooking class taught by Grace Chu, a woman whom I have never heard anyone call anything other than Madame Chu. Madame Chu opened two new worlds to me. One was the world of Chinese cooking, for which I have developed as much affection as I have for the cuisines of my own country. The other was the world of cooking classes. I had never imagined that cooking was something that could be taught in a class.

  To my regret, that first Chinese cooking course was also my last. Madame Chu announced that she was taking a sabbatical in China, and my classmates looked around for something different to cook until she came back. One of them asked me what I was cooking at home. “Normal food,” I said. “What is normal food?” she asked. I mentioned tagliatelle alla bolognese, fegato alla veneziana, risotto coi funghi, and rollatini di vitello con la pancetta, to which she made no reply. During our next class session, she asked me if I had ever had any teaching experience. Thinking of the classes I had taught in Italy, I said of course, it was what I had been trained to do. During another session she borrowed my typewrit
ten copy of the day’s recipe, and when she returned it, I found written on the back of it “For Italian cooking classes,” followed by the names and telephone numbers of six of the women in class. I consulted Victor, who was all for it. “Why not?” he said. “You like to teach, you like to cook, and you have plenty of spare time.” In October 1969, in the tight space of our apartment’s kitchen, I began to teach Italian cooking once a week to six of my Chinese cooking classmates.

  I tried to model my classes after Madame Chu’s, which were beautifully organized. But I had to adapt them to my circumstances. Grace Chu had a large kitchen with room for a large table where the students stood to do their prepping. My kitchen was practically a galley kitchen, short and narrow, and it had to accommodate six students plus Lucia, my housekeeper from Italy—now also my assistant—and me. The best the students could do was to stand very close to one another and watch what I was doing.

  We had an antique dining table in a nook just outside the kitchen, and it was there that, with an oilcloth protecting the tabletop, I prepped for our own meals. It was too low to work on standing up, so I did it sitting down, having discovered it to be the most comfortable way to prep. The dining nook became part of my teaching space. In the kitchen they stood and watched, at the table they sat and worked. It was where I sat my students down to discuss the lesson, to examine the ingredients together, and to prep. I bought individual cutting boards and knives for everyone, and by each place at table, I set a moist washcloth for wiping one’s fingers. I found that working sitting down was so convenient that for most of my teaching career thereafter I adopted it whenever it was possible.

  From the very beginning, each of my lessons was based on a complete menu: an appetizer, sometimes; always a first course—pasta, risotto, or soup—followed by a second course, meat or fish; a suitable accompanying vegetable course or a simple, refreshing salad; and a dessert, which frequently was marinated fruit, in one combination or another. We prepped and cooked and assembled the menu from scratch, and we ate it at table in proper sequence to demonstrate the timing of preparation and rhythm of consumption of a classic Italian meal. Time was a fundamental ingredient that students didn’t always know how to handle efficiently. They all wanted terribly to cook, but they rarely could find time to do it except during long weekends. Italians cook full, fresh, unpretentious, but tasteful meals every day for their family, and to the very last class of my career, I have tried to show how it is done.

  The first recipe I chose to demonstrate in each lesson was for the dish that required the least preparation but needed the most time to cook. While it was on the fire, we trimmed the vegetables, which take a lot of prepping but cook in a short time. If the vegetables had to be blanched, I would put a pot of water on the fire in advance so that it would already be boiling when I needed it. Waiting for water to boil is a horrible waste of time. I would always have something cooking while I was working on something else; the fricassee would be on the fire while I was preparing the pasta sauce, the pasta sauce would be cooking while I was making a dessert of fresh fruits, and the pasta might be cooking while I was deglazing the pan in which the meat had been cooked. I showed my students that if the preparation of several dishes overlapped, there would be no idle moments in the kitchen, and they could produce the several courses of a classic Italian meal in relatively little time.

  I had described the food that we ate at home as “normal food,” but little about it was normal to my students. Why do Italians eat so much? they wanted to know. They don’t, I told them. But what about all those courses? they asked. I explained: We really don’t have that many courses; the appetizer course would be part of a special holiday meal, as would the dessert. At home, seasonal fruit usually takes the place of a baked dessert. We do have two courses, a first and a second, instead of a main course. However, we have two courses not in order to eat more but in order to eat less and more frugally. The pasta course, when it is served Italian style rather than Italian-American style, is quite small and has a minimal amount of sauce. The meat or fish in the course that follows is an expensive ingredient, but if you have a pasta or risotto or soup first, a small portion of it is sufficient. With meat, we always have a tasty vegetable, with fish, a simple salad of greens or tomatoes dressed with vinegar and olive oil. The quantities are small, but it is a more satisfying and a better-balanced way to eat.

  I also had to point out that when we say Italian cooking, what we are really talking about is the cooking of Italian regions. The iconic dish of Naples is linguine with clams; in Florence, it is bean-and-black-cabbage soup; in Bologna, it is homemade noodles with meat sauce; and in Venice, it is a risotto with either fish or vegetables. Moreover, up to recent times, the people living in one region would have had little experience of the cooking of another. When I was young, we didn’t have spaghetti or other forms of factory-made pasta, which were not common in northern Italy until after the war.

  Victor got a two-sided map of Italy to help me describe both the historical and the physical causes of the profound differences in regional cooking. One side showed the country divided into the territories that loosely correspond to the independent states into which Italy was divided before it became a nation, in 1861. The other side was a physical map that allowed me to point, for example, to the large plain in the northeast, where it was feasible to raise cows that produced milk for making the butter that is essential to those cuisines; or to the slopes of the predominantly hilly areas of the center and south, where, instead of raising cows for their butter, it was more practical to cultivate olive trees for their oil. There were so many such examples of the roots of regional cooking that when I eventually opened my cooking school in Bologna, I expanded that talk into a full-scale lecture, using two five-foot maps. I have since carried those maps around the world and given that lecture wherever I have taught a class and whenever I have been invited to talk about the cooking of Italy.

  Italians, like other Latin people, eat almost everything. It had never occurred to me that parts of animals, or animals that for me were conventional and delicious fare, might provoke a case of nerves in others. That year was as filled with surprises for me as it was for my six ladies. The day I chose to do lamb kidneys was a grim one. If there had been a Fletcher Christian in my class, they would have mutinied. “What could possibly be wrong with eating lamb kidneys?” I wondered. It is a piece of meat like any other, and much tastier than most. I insisted that we prepare the meal as I had planned it, and they even admitted that the kidneys were quite tasty. But I have never made it again, except for Victor and myself, and for Italian guests.

  A dish that has sometimes caused problems for students who keep kosher is a Bolognese pan-roast of pork and milk. A student once asked if she could make it with a different kind of meat. “Yes,” I said, “you can use veal, but it won’t have the same depth of flavor.” “If I make it with veal, can I omit the milk?” “Why do you want to make it at all?” I asked her. I have never taken that pork and milk off my class menus. There is no other dish made in Italy that more neatly embodies the genius of the cuisine, reaching a pinnacle of flavor with the bare minimum of ingredients—only two, pork and milk—and the simplest of procedures.

  I cannot count the number of students who recoiled from handling fish with its head on. “It is looking at me!” they cried. I cried back, “How can it look at you? It’s dead!” Or those who shrank from eating rabbit: “The poor little bunny.” I remember a man in one of my Bologna classes who, I noticed, ate perhaps less than half of all the dishes we cooked. I spoke to him discreetly, on the side. “Do you have a dietary problem?” I asked. “Oh, no, I can eat everything,” he said. “Then why don’t you?” “I hate the taste of anything made with olive oil.” “You don’t like olive oil and you have come all the way to Italy to eat and to cook?” I wanted to ask, but didn’t. I had already acquired the reputation of being sharp with students, and I was trying not to add to it.

  Perhaps the most dramatic confront
ations I had were over squid. Squid is an extraordinary source of flavor when used in seafood risottos, pasta sauces, or fish soups. On its own, it makes the tastiest stew. A squid’s elegant triangular sac is one of the most versatile and delicious containers for stuffing of all kinds. The most popular, but also the most neutral tasting, way to cook squid is to slice it into rings and fry it. In American restaurants, it is hardly ever served any other way, and on the menu, the dish is listed simply as calamari. “Calamari,” however, happens to be the Italian word for squid, whether it is live or raw or cooked in any of its thousand possible ways. In Venice, I once took an American visitor to the celebrated restaurant Da Fiore, where, after a cursory look at the menu, she ordered calamari. When she was eventually presented with a plate of beautiful, burnished stuffed squid sacs, she was shocked. “I didn’t order that,” she said, “I ordered calamari.”

  I was determined that students become acquainted with squid’s many delectable uses, so in almost all of my courses, I have had a lesson in which we cleaned squid and cooked it in some way, but not fried in rings. To bring a bowl of raw squid soaking in water and ask the ladies—men didn’t mind—to plunge their naked, manicured hands into it, retrieve a whole slippery squid, and perform the necessary cleaning and trimming procedures was to provoke a battle of wills. It was a battle I never lost. Anyone who refused was asked to leave the class, and none ever did. It wasn’t as futile an effort as one might think. From time to time, I would hear that someone was putting squid into their risotto, or stewing it with tomatoes and chili pepper as I had taught them, or making stuffed squid, as I had suggested, for a buffet. It made me so glad.