I described how the elation at reading the favorable reviews of my book had been counterbalanced by my disappointment at how poorly it had been distributed. Victor asked if Julia would let us quote from her letter so that we might persuade the publisher to use it in an ad promoting the book. Julia said she couldn’t do that because it was her policy never to supply a quote for publication. She explained that once you do that, it opens a door that everyone will want to go through, and moreover, if it’s a cookbook, people will assume you have tried the recipes and are vouching for them. “A sensible policy,” I thought. “If, in the future, anyone should ask me for a quote, I’ll follow her example.” “What you need,” Julia said, “is a good editor, and I am going to introduce you to mine, Judith Jones at Knopf.”
Had I not met Judith, my career might well have ended when the last copies of the Harper’s Magazine Press edition of my cookbook had been sold or remaindered. I would learn, thanks to Judith, what it meant to be well-published. To work with her was to work with someone who wanted for you no less than what you wanted for yourself, and showed you how to get it.
“I would like to publish your next book,” she said, “but no doubt Harper’s Magazine Press has put a right to first refusal in your contract. A good agent can get you out of that. Have you got one?”
“No.”
“I’ll ask mine to get in touch with you. His name is Robert Lescher, and he is a good man. He can help you.”
Bob—aside from Judith’s first reference, I never heard him called Robert—had an office with a hospitably clubby feeling, filled with soft armchairs, a fireplace, and shelves and stacks of books, in a garden apartment a couple of blocks away from our new apartment on East Seventy-sixth Street. When I called on him, I immediately felt comfortable with Bob. He was tall, with a broad, playful, slightly gap-toothed smile; a warm voice; and a gentle, humorous turn to his conversation. We went to lunch. In the middle of a New York winter day he wore no overcoat, just a muffler looped around his throat. I don’t know if he has ever owned an overcoat; I have never seen him with one. We talked about my relationship with Harper’s Magazine Press, which was deteriorating fast.
Peter Mollman had left Harper’s in January 1974 to head the production team at Random House. Larry Freundlich was the new boss, and as far as I could see, he could do nothing right. He sent me on a brief, ineffectual tour, choosing as my escort a man who would write out the programs we were to follow in incomprehensible longhand, and who booked us in first class so that he could have his fill of free liquor. He also booked adjoining rooms in the hotels, but my first move upstairs was to make sure the door from my room to his was securely locked. I was embarrassed to be seen with him. The most damaging thing that Larry did, however, was to sell the British rights to The Classic Italian Cook Book to W. H. Allen, without consulting me. The W. H. Allen edition was a facsimile of the American one, printed on cheap, thick paper. No attempt had been made to revise the measurements, ingredients, and vocabulary so that the recipes would be more comprehensible to British cooks. Now I had two books that weren’t moving, one in America, another in Britain.
Bob smoothly negotiated a release from Harper’s Magazine Press and drew up a contract with Knopf for a new cookbook. At this point Judith said, “We really should have both your books under our imprint.” “How do we do that?” I asked. “Talk to Bob, he should be able to figure something out.” He did. He got Larry Freundlich to name a price for the rights to the book. It was twenty thousand dollars. We didn’t have twenty thousand; we had ten, our entire savings. We asked Bob to talk to Judith to see if Knopf was willing to contribute the other half of the purchase price. They were. I felt low when we went to the bank. I grew up in a family where there never had been any money, and it was hard to make out a withdrawal slip for practically everything we had been able to save. But Victor said, “This is exactly what savings are for.” We believed in our cookbook, and we believed in Judith. It was the best investment of our lives. Thirty years later, it is still paying us back.
Judith and Knopf’s designer did a masterful repackaging job. The jacket was in earthy hues, ochre and mustard; the title and my name were in white on a green cartouche. A sampling of quotes from the scores of enthusiastic reviews I had received filled both the front and back of the jacket. One of my favorites was by Roy Andries de Groot, who at the time was one of the most respected writers on food: “Marcella’s book is the most authentic and best guide to Italian food ever written in the U.S. Where other authors failed, Marcella has brilliantly succeeded in capturing (and conveying to the reader on almost every page) the feel, the aromatic scent, the subtle nuances of fresh country flavors and, above all, the easy uncomplication of Italian food prepared in the Italian style.” The first Knopf edition of The Classic Italian Cook Book was published February 27, 1976. It was reprinted twenty-two times until, in 1992, its contents, together with those of my second book, More Classic Italian Cooking, were absorbed by my fourth book, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking.
It didn’t cost us anything to repossess the British rights to my cookbook. W. H. Allen’s lamentable edition could not and did not fare well. They let it go out of print, and Bob moved quickly to recover our rights. My new British publisher was Macmillan, and my English editor was Caroline Hobhouse.
Caro was everything that you can imagine a grand English literary lady might be: tall, handsome, amusing, aristocratic in speech and bearing. She had a beautiful house in London where she gave us dinner parties so that we could meet figures from the British food establishment, such as Alan Davidson. Unfortunately, I didn’t take to Davidson, nor he to me. Caro engaged Anna Del Conte, an Italian writer who had married an Englishman, to adapt my book for English use, converting all the measurements from the American spoons and cups into both metric and British units, anglicizing the spelling and even the vocabulary—“aubergine” instead of “eggplant,” for example—and where necessary replacing an ingredient unavailable in England with one that was. The Macmillan edition of The Classic Italian Cook Book was published in the spring of 1980; the venerable Hatchard’s bookshop on Piccadilly filled its window with it, and I had a transatlantic hit to add to my stateside one.
1980, London. The Classic Italian Cook Book in the window of Hatchard’s on Piccadilly
A Funny Thing Happened
1973-1975
IN THE FALL of the year my book was published, I was invited to do a demonstration on the Joyce Brothers television show. The producer looked through the cookbook and chose a recipe for striped bass stuffed with several kinds of shellfish and baked sealed in foil. I had five minutes in which to bone the fish; stuff it with clams, mussels, oysters, and shrimp; wrap it in foil; remove from the oven a similar fish previously prepared and already cooked; unwrap it and slice it, all the while chatting with Dr. Brothers, who was expected to drop in a plug for my book. Just to bone the fish would have taken me twenty minutes, so I boned it at home; then I put the bone back in its place and closed the fish over it. When I was on camera I opened up the fish, I went through the motions of running a knife under the bone, and presto! Off came the whole bone in just seconds.
There was another guest cooking, Enzo Stuarti, a Mario Lanza-style tenor who was going to cook spaghetti. The precooked spaghetti was in a pot of still-boiling water. The pot had a perforated insert for draining cooked pasta, a metal basket that Stu-arti
With Dr. Joyce Brothers, my first television appearance
lifted and carried past me with scalding water still dripping from it. He let it drip all over my feet. It was my first time on television, but it became the last time that I allowed a producer to choose what I was to demonstrate, and the last time I shared a cooking segment with anyone else.
Like others who have been nurtured by the settled life of a small town, I have never felt a strong urge to expand my habitat. I am not a self-promoter, but New York is a bellows that can fan great flames from small sparks. In the year that my cookbook was publish
ed, I was invited to dinners and parties, and in a few months, I had met nearly everyone in, or at the margins of, the city’s food world. I immediately felt strong empathy for and from James Beard. I was startled at first by the open-air shower that he had in the back of his house on West Twelfth Street, but I soon understood that it wasn’t crude exhibitionism; it was a manifestation of his natural candor, of his aversion to cover-ups. I was amazed by what he knew and remembered. He was my living encyclopedia: Whenever I had a question, he had the answer. He had a sonorous voice that he used as a foil for the mischief in his eyes. His laugh was magnificent, rising from deep within his capacious belly. An example of it still rings in my memory’s ears. Sometime after we had become friends, we were both giving cooking classes in Italy, Jim at the Gritti Palace in Venice and I at my school in Bologna. Jim was always collecting recipes for a syndicated column that he wrote. He phoned me in Bologna to ask a question about an ingredient.
“Marcella!” said the booming voice. “I came across a recipe in an Italian magazine that I would like to use, it’s for shrimp with a beautiful pink sauce, and it sounds delicious, but it’s driving me nuts.”
“What’s the problem?”
“There is a mysterious ingredient in it that has to be essential to the pink sauce because nothing else in the list has that color. I have looked it up everywhere, but there is no description of it in any of the sources. I hope you can help me out.”
“I hope so too. What is it?”
“Rubra.”
“Oh, sure, Jim, it’s ketchup.”
“Ketchup?”
“That’s right. Rubra is the best-known Italian brand of ketchup.”
Ho, ho, ho, the big laugh came rolling over the phone line, over and over, such a happy laugh, as though he had just heard the funniest joke in the world.
Tom Margittai and Paul Kovi, both Hungarians and both executives at Restaurant Associates, became the new operators of the Four Seasons and the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurants when their company divested itself of those two properties. Paul was very Old World, wearing well-tailored conservative three-piece suits, the vest, crossed by a gold watch chain, resting on a prosperous paunch. He spoke English with a suave accent and had an air of great connoisseurship, looking both paternal and shrewd. When he found out that I came from Cesenatico, he said, “I know it well. When I was young I played on a professional Italian soccer team, and we trained near there.” He was the only person I had met in New York who had heard of and been in my hometown. Tom was jet-settish, fashionable, and briskly entrepreneurial. Both became generous friends, but I got to see more of Tom, perhaps because he was more likely to be away from the restaurant than Paul.
Tom had dinner with us at home and loved what I cooked. He offered to give my cookbook a boost by hosting a fortnight at the Forum of the Twelve Caesars restaurant based on my recipes. For $25, one could have an antipasto, a first course, a second course, salad, and dessert, choosing from a menu of nineteen dishes. One of the two fish dishes offered was the stuffed striped bass I had demonstrated on television. Three Italian wines were included. The event was to run from November 11 through November 23, but it was so successful that they held it over until December 7.
I was there every evening to talk to guests. One evening Tom told me to expect Danny Kaye, who was coming with his daughter Dena. Danny left me no opportunity to talk to anyone else that evening. I learned that cooking was one of his great loves. He had others, of course, including piloting airplanes and dabbling in a variety of medical subjects, but he was obviously an extremely well-informed and deeply committed cook. I discovered too that, aside from Italian cooking, we had another culinary passion in common, Chinese food. Danny described the special Chinese kitchen he had built in his Beverly Hills house. He had gas burners with several concentric rings able to reach such high temperatures that, to make getting close to them tolerable, he had had to install a steel trough in front of the stove with a stream of ice water circulating through it. “Do you know how the Chinese make chicken lollipops?” he asked me. “Come into the kitchen and I’ll show you.” If you are Danny Kaye, you can walk into a restaurant’s busy kitchen unannounced and ask someone to give you a chicken thigh and a knife. He loosened the skin at the knob end of the bone, scraped the flesh upward to leave the bone clean, and turned the skin inside out over the thick part of the drumstick. “There! You now have a chicken lollipop ready for frying. Let me know if you come to California,” Danny said. “I’ll make you a Chinese dinner.”
As it happened, I had already accepted an invitation to teach in the Napa Valley wine country in the spring of the following year. The courses were organized by Michael James, a long-haired, delicate-looking young man with a thin mustache, and his friend and associate, Billy Cross. Michael had been a student of Julia Child’s old partner, Simone Beck, known to all as Simca. Simca was to launch the event, followed by Jacques Pépin, and I was to conclude it with a three-week stint.
The venue for the courses was a Victorian villa, but my accommodations were in an adjacent cottage. Students could sign up for a two-day or three-day course or for a full week. Evenings were free. I was puzzled to find that Michael and Billy, who did all the marketing, would come back with quantities of ingredients much greater than I had requested. “Why so much food?” I asked Michael. “There is going to be a lot left over.” “Don’t worry about it, Marcella; we don’t want the students to think we are skimping.” I was not too happy about it because I hate leftovers and try to avoid them. I have never had a microwave in my kitchens. Few are the dishes that taste as good reheated as they do when freshly cooked. Cold or warmed-over pasta, for example, is unspeakable. On our first Saturday evening, Michael asked me to join them for dinner in the villa. When I walked in, I discovered the reason for the large quantities of food I had cooked. All the dishes from my classes had been resuscitated, and friends of Michael and Billy were feasting on them. The room was filled with young men and votive candles, and I felt extremely uncomfortable. As soon as I could, I grabbed a piece of bread and some cheese and fled to my room.
One of our students was Dagmar Sullivan, whose grandfather, Georges de Latour, had founded Beaulieu Vineyard. On Monday morning, she asked me how I had spent the weekend. “In my room,” I said. “What a pity,” she said. “We have to do something about that.” She alerted everyone in the Valley, and from that moment, I was never alone for dinner in the evening. No one is more hospitable than wine people, and I enjoyed the company, the food, and the wines at table with the Heitzes, the Jaegers, the Mondavis, with Dagmar and her amusing husband,Walter, of course, and with many others whose names have now slipped away beyond recall.
Another of my students at the villa was a tall, blond, robust cooking teacher from San Francisco, Loni Kuhn. Soon after, when I opened a cooking school in Bologna, Loni was one of the first to attend. She invited me to come to San Francisco in the winter to give classes at her school, which I did for many years. I became then as much at home in San Francisco as I was in New York. For the entire time that I was there, Jim Nassikas, the general manager of the Stanford Court hotel, generously made available the suite that was always reserved for James Beard when he came to town. Nassikas used to joke that he carried cigarette butts in his pocket that he distributed in odd corners of the hallways to see how long it would take the staff to sweep them away. It was only a slight exaggeration, and I can’t even be sure that it wasn’t true. I have never known a more immaculate hotel than the Stanford Court of those early Jim Nassikas years. Jim liked to cook, but I was never able to persuade him that you can’t make a true risotto unless you stir it.
Victor and I made a great many friends in California, and one of those whose company I most enjoyed was Jeremiah Tower. He had charm, good looks, and the poise of a gentleman. He was no longer cooking at Chez Panisse, but he used to take us for lunch to the café upstairs, driving us there in a marvelous car whose interior glowed with more polished wood than I had ever s
een inside an automobile. We talked a lot about cooking, of course, and although the places we had come from, Australia and Italy, were so distant from each other, our feelings about food had the same origin. We had a kindred devotion to taste, taste free of affectation, taste that was clear, bold, and simple, taste that wanted only to be good. The meals that Jeremiah cooked for us at the places he subsequently opened, the Santa Fe Café and Stars, were the most delectable seafood feasts I have ever had in America, comparable with the best that I have ever had in Italy or in Asia. He eventually left San Francisco; he was in Hong Kong for a while, and in New York, but after the publication of his idol-smashing memoir in 2003, I lost his tracks. Sometimes in my daydreams, Jeremiah and I are as young as we were then, and I am still licking my fingers over his crab, lobster, and shrimp.
I had finished my third week of teaching for Michael at the Napa Valley villa, and I was packing to leave for New York, looking forward to being with Victor again, when I got a telephone call. It was Danny Kaye. “I am in Seattle. Tonight I am conducting the Seattle Symphony; tomorrow morning early I am returning to Los Angeles.” He then gave me the number and time of a flight that I was to take from San Francisco to Los Angeles. “You will land not too long after me,” he said. “I’ll wait for you at the gate, we’ll go marketing, and in the evening I’ll make dinner.” “But Danny, I already have a ticket for New York and Victor is expecting me.” I don’t think he even heard. “Look for me at the gate,” he said. “I’ll be there waiting.” And he hung up. When I called Victor, he said, “You don’t want to stand him up. Go, you’ll have a good time.”
As I came off the plane, I had no trouble spotting Danny under his soft-brimmed hat with an outsize crocodile logo. He drove us home, where I was given just enough time to put my bag down and use the bathroom. Before heading for the farmer’s market, he leafed through the book of menus he had served. “To jog my memory,” he said. When we returned, he showed me his kitchens, one for Western cooking, one for Chinese. The stove of the latter was as he had described when we had talked in New York; when the burners were at their maximum setting, the gas came on like a blast from a jet engine.
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