Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  When we finished our first series of six lessons, the ladies asked for another series, then another, and then another. We had started in October; we finished in June. I said good-bye to them affectionately but decisively. We had been together a year, scholastically speaking, and they and I deserved to graduate to something else. I would love to see them again, I said, but not for a cooking class.

  I had found a cheap flight to Italy. I longed to see my widowed mother, who in turn longed to see her grandson, and for the next few weeks, Giuliano and I were back in Cesenatico. When we returned in August, Victor asked me whether I wanted to continue giving cooking classes. “Of course,” I said. I had never done anything that I enjoyed more, but I didn’t see how I could recruit other students. No one, aside from those first six ladies, knew that I was available to teach cooking. Victor recalled having seen a list of cooking schools come out in the New York Times food section toward the end of the summer. “I’ll write to them,” he said, “and perhaps they’ll add your name to the list.” Shortly thereafter, we received a letter from the Times. They were sorry, but the list had already been set and it was too late to include my classes in it. “That’s that!” I said. My new career had been a short one, and I started to look around to see how, aside from doing ikebana, I could fill my time.

  Two or three weeks later, I had a telephone call from a stranger. I was then—and to a degree, I am today—uncomfortable speaking English over the telephone. On the phone, a foreign language sounds even more foreign. It was a man from the Times. He wanted to come over and interview me about my cooking class.

  “When would you like to come?” I asked.

  “How about Wednesday?” he said.

  “That’s fine,” I said. “What time?”

  “Twelve thirty.”

  “Oh, at twelve thirty my husband and I are having lunch.”

  “Well, then, how about Thursday?”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “What time?”

  “Twelve thirty.”

  “But my husband comes home for lunch every day at twelve thirty. If you really want to come at that time, come for lunch.”

  He said he did not usually accept lunch invitations, but he was intrigued to hear that Victor would be there, and he accepted.

  “Anything new this morning?” Victor asked at lunch. I told him about the call from the Times. “Who was it?” he asked. “Someone named Crec, Greg, I didn’t catch the name.” I have never been a good catcher of names. “Could it have been Craig Claiborne?” “That’s it!” I said. “You know who he is,” he said. “Don’t you remember that you always read his columns in the food section of the Times? He is the most famous food writer in America.” I did read Claiborne’s

  October 1970. Setting lunch for Craig Claiborne

  pieces, but neither the name of the writer nor his reputation had ever registered with me.

  I decided to serve Claiborne a complete Italian meal: appetizer, first course, second course, salad, dessert. For the appetizer, I made Carciofi alla Romana, artichokes served upside down with their stems pointing up, as I had learned to do in Rome. My first course was one we used to make often at home in Cesenatico, Tortelloni di Bieta e Ricotta, hand-rolled pasta shaped into tortelloni that were stuffed with Swiss chard and ricotta. The second course was Rollatini di Vitello, veal rolls stuffed with pancetta and Parmesan cheese, cooked in butter and tomatoes, and sauced with a few drops of their pan juices reduced with white wine. The salad was raw finocchio sliced very thin, seasoned with salt, olive oil, and black pepper. It was too much food to end in a sweet dessert, so I prepared one of my favorite fruit bowls, Arance Marinate, peeled, sliced oranges marinated with a little bit of sugar and served cold. It was a lovely meal. Nearly forty years have passed, but I don’t think I can improve on it.

  I knew nothing about interviews. To me, it was just a guest joining us for lunch. The food was the thing. In Italy, when someone comes to eat, you don’t bother with preliminaries; you go straight to the table. When the doorman rang to let me know that Claiborne was coming up, I turned on the heat under the saucepan of water in which I was to cook the pasta and put the cooked veal rolls back in the pan to reheat them. When Claiborne came in, however, he said he wanted to interview me before we sat down to eat, so I rushed back to the kitchen to turn all the burners off. When the interview was over, I turned on the heat under all the pans again, and I brought the artichokes to the table. We had just started on the artichokes when the doorman rang to say that there was a photographer from the Times downstairs. Claiborne had him come up, saying that if I didn’t mind, he would take some photographs before we continued with the meal. Back into the kitchen I went to turn off all the fires, convinced that the veal was going to be leather-hard by the time I finished warming it up again. Miraculously, every dish was very good, and Craig, who in the years to follow would become a close friend, was enchanted. On the following Thursday, Craig’s story covered the better part of a page. He printed my telephone number, and my cooking classes sprang to life again. It was October 15, 1970. I have never since then had to be concerned about how to occupy my time.

  A Book Born Twice and Twice Reborn

  1971-1980

  A YEAR HAD PASSED since Craig Claiborne’s visit when I had another telephone call from a stranger. As I understood it, he was from Harper’s Bazaar, he had seen my cooking school listed in the Times, and he had something that he wanted to discuss with me. Nothing else he said was clear to me. I didn’t feel like struggling with a puzzling conversation over the telephone, so I invited him to come for dinner, hoping that he would write about my school for the magazine.

  I opened the door to a tall, lean man in his late thirties, with a full head of curly dark hair. He came in with a bright smile.

  “Good evening, I am Peter Mollman. Thank you for having me, I am so happy to meet you.”

  “You are from Harper’s Bazaar?” I asked.

  “Harper’s Bazaar? Oh, no. I am with Harper & Row.”

  “What is the difference?”

  “We have no connection with the magazine. We are a book publisher. I am in charge of production there, but I am also the publisher of Harper’s Magazine Press, a separate Harper imprint.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I tried to conceal my confusion, relying on Victor to explain it all to me later. In the meantime, I showed him in, and soon thereafter, to the table. I hadn’t yet adopted the custom of engaging guests in lengthy conversation over drinks and nibbles before serving dinner.

  “Why did you want to talk to me?” I asked, after we had begun to eat.

  “You must have heard of the publisher Mondadori?” he began by saying.

  “Of course, everyone in Italy knows Mondadori.”

  “I recently spent three months with them in Verona, and I couldn’t believe how wonderful the food was there. It is so different from Italian food in America, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, sure, very, very different,” I said.

  “When I came back from Verona, I looked for a cookbook in English with recipes for dishes like the ones I had had in Italy, but there doesn’t seem to be one. Have you ever come across any?”

  Had he come over to ask me to recommend a cookbook? I wondered. “No, I never have,” I said.

  “Well then, wouldn’t you like to write one?”

  “No.”

  He responded with the explosive laugh that would punctuate the many meetings we had thereafter.

  “Why not?”

  “I can’t write in English.”

  Victor broke in at this point. “That is no problem,” he said. “I can put it into English for you.”

  Not too many days later, Peter called to say he had a contract ready for me to sign, but he needed to insert a delivery date.

  “How long do you think it will take you?”

  “I am not sure. How about three months?”

  “Let us make it ten,” he said.

  I knew nothing abo
ut writing a cookbook, but I had been teaching full-time for two years, and I had learned how to help students grasp the sense and method of a recipe. Moreover, I didn’t have to hunt for recipes. I had cooked scores of dishes for my family in my sixteen years of marriage, and many of those I had recently taught in class. I knew their workings backward and forward. I had brought my favorite cookbooks from Italy and I studied them now, not, as I had been wont to do, in search of cooking ideas, but to see how they were organized and how the recipes were set down. They were of no help. In Italy, cookbooks are written for a public already familiar with the procedures of the cuisine. The instructions are in a cooking shorthand that I would have loved to use, but if I had, my recipes would have been inaccessible to most American readers. Together with Victor, who from that moment became my inseparable collaborator, I looked at the recipe styles of several cookbooks popular in America, and we eventually adopted the model that Craig Claiborne had followed, in which everything was spelled out and each step was numbered. It seemed to us the clearest approach of all, and we have stayed with it through all my cookbooks.

  I equipped myself with a batch of spiral notebooks and a box of ball-point pens, Victor bought a portable Smith Corona electric typewriter, and we got down to work. During the day, I wrote out my recipes by hand—just as I am now writing these recollections—and tested them in the kitchen for reliability and accurate measurements. In the evening, when Victor came home from work, he read the recipes I had written. My approach was spontaneous and intuitive, his was deliberate and rational. He had an inexhaustible, and sometimes infuriating, store of questions: “How much butter, how much onion? Here you say flour spread on a plate; why not tell them how much? How much basil for the pesto? I have always seen you snap the ends off the green beans, but you don’t say anything here about doing that.” Sometimes, to satisfy him, but not without irritation, I tested a recipe again on another day. The mayonnaise I had to redo from scratch because I had made it without measuring any of the ingredients except for the eggs. Unless I was baking a cake, I never measured ahead of time, because it would have interfered with my instincts. I measured after the fact, calculating from how much was left in the measuring cup how much oil I had used, or how much butter was missing from a whole stick. I repeatedly tested the recipe, obediently following my original measurements, a procedure that felt as awkward for me as it was necessary for Victor. Once Victor was comfortable with my instructions, he would turn on his Smith Corona and give English expression to my notes and to the observations that had emerged from our discussions.

  The title we gave the book was The Classic Italian Cook Book. Its subtitle was The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating. To il-lustrate

  February 1972. Believing our work had come to an end, we photographed the manuscript of The Classic Italian Cook Book before taking it to the publisher.

  what I meant by the art of eating, I appended menus to each recipe to serve as examples of well-conceived Italian family meals. We completed the manuscript in less than ten months. When it was done, Victor placed the thick stack of typewritten pages on a table and photographed it. We knew so little about book publishing that we never expected to see it again. He delivered it himself to Harper’s, and as all thoughts of the cookbook vanished from our minds, we left for a two-week holiday at Club Med in Martinique.

  Not too long after our return, a messenger brought our manuscript back. The once beautiful clean margins were cluttered with notations, and thus we became acquainted with what an editor does. I can remember only two of her observations. She pointed out that we had used the adjective “piquant” five times in as many recipes and wondered whether we were considering calling this The Piquant Italian Cook Book. Victor was mortified. I am not sure that he has ever again described anything as piquant. The other boner was the editor’s. I had a recipe for mussels following one for clams, and she wondered why I didn’t call both of them clams. “Aren’t they the same thing?” she wrote.

  We thought we were done when we had replied to all the editor’s queries and returned the manuscript to Harper’s, but it came back with a whole new set of notes, those of the copy editor. This is the person who catches everything that the editor misses, parses your sentences, and brings your errant syntax into line. You can meet an editor many times and even have lunch with her, but all you ever see of the copy editor are her remarks and corrections in colored pencil. I have never met the copy editors of any of my books, but although anonymous, they were never reticent. The margins of a manuscript and, if there was not sufficient space on them, the paper banners Scotch-taped to the edges of the page bore copious evidence of exchanges that, while courteous, could be sharp, but were also, on occasion, encouraging.

  We had hoped this would be the last time we would see our marked-up pages, and it was. In the next phase, we were presented with long sheets of paper called galleys that bore our words set into type. We had to comb those for any errors that might have escaped the editor, the copy editor, the typesetter, and ourselves. We were even allowed a limited amount of rewriting. We were deeply moved by those first galleys of our publishing career, because what we had done was finally beginning to look like a book. But we weren’t finished yet. The galleys were followed by page proofs, which were laid out and set like the pages of the finished book. It can be quite expensive to correct a page proof, so one hopes to find few errors and flees the temptation to do any rewriting. That was thirty-five years ago. Computers have since transformed the whole process, making it faster, more accurate, and more flexible.

  Victor and I shared the burden of dealing with edits, but the task of working with the illustrator, and preparing all the food he had to draw, was mine alone. Peter had chosen a marvelous draftsman, a Japanese artist named George Koizumi. He made the best drawings I have ever seen in a cookbook, lively, clear, with vigorous line and powerful chiaroscuro. When recently I read Bill Buford’s account in Heat of his pilgrimage to a mountain town near Bologna to learn the secret of turning tortellini on one’s fingertip, I thought of how much trouble he might have spared himself by turning to page 156 of The Classic Italian Cook Book and studying George Koizumi’s wonderful drawing of that step. The only problem George had came up when he had to draw chestnuts to accompany the illustration of Monte Bianco, a dessert made of a purée of chocolate and chestnuts. He had never seen a chestnut, and there were none in the stores because it wasn’t their season. He used Chinese water chestnuts from a can as a model, but he drew them so large that they looked gigantic next to the dessert. He redrew them, but they have never looked quite right. When I wrote More Classic Italian Cooking, a sequel to the first book, we tried to get George to do the drawings. He wouldn’t be persuaded, however. It took too much of his time, he said, and it distracted him from the art that he wanted to produce for himself. I had a good time working with George, and when he would finish a sketch and we sat down to eat the models I had prepared for him to draw, I believe he enjoyed himself too.

  Peter had the book’s jacket designed without discussing it with us. When he sent it over, both Victor and I were aghast. It was a bright tomato-red with green stripes, the title in white. It was the Italian colors. Except when they win a world soccer title, an event that may take place once or twice in a decade, Italians are not flag-wavers. They had enough of doing it during the twenty years of fascist rule. There are no flagpoles in front of private buildings, no flags fluttering from car fenders, no flag decals stuck to car windows, and save for Mr. Berlusconi, men do not wear lapel pins of the flag.

  Peter’s design provoked the only sharp exchange of words with him that we have ever had. We succeeded in getting the green stripes removed, but nothing else was changed. When the book was reissued by Knopf, we were elated to see that garish jacket discarded in favor of the elegant one that Judith Jones chose for us. Ironically, the Harper’s Magazine Press edition of The Classic Italian Cook Book in its original wrapper has become a collector’s item. I recently saw o
ne offered at $150. Today, when I look at the tomato-red jacket of my first book, the resentment has gone, replaced by nostalgia for those young, tumultuous moments of my publishing career.

  The Classic Italian Cook Book was published in the spring of 1973, collecting enthusiastic reviews from all quarters. I was as happy as I was incredulous at its extraordinary reception. Walking past the Doubleday bookstore on Fifth Avenue, I saw it featured in the window display, and it so thrilled me that I ran home to get my camera so that I could photograph it. My high spirits tumbled to the ground, however, during a small tour that the publisher had arranged for me. I went to Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I was interviewed by the local food editors, I was on a few radio talk programs, and I did some cooking on television. Wherever I was, I visited bookstores, looking for my book on the cookbook shelves. I never found one anywhere. “Why am I here promoting something that no one will be able to buy?” I wondered.

  On my return home, Victor suggested we try to meet Julia Child and ask her advice. He wrote her a letter attached to a copy of my book, and she wrote a warm letter back, with a flattering comment on my work. We spoke on the phone and arranged for her and her husband, Paul, to come for lunch on their next visit to New York. I don’t remember what I made for lunch, but I remember that we connected quickly and openly. Julia described how she got into cooking in Paris. Paul talked about the time he was a young man and always walked around with a chip on his shoulder. I didn’t understand the expression, so he demonstrated by placing his knife on his shoulder and mimicking someone ill-advisedly knocking it off. The knife was part of a handmade set of close-to-pure silver, and its handle still bears the small dent that it acquired when it fell to the floor.