Of the people at table, I remember Danny’s wife, Sylvia Fine, a funny lady; the actor Roddy McDowall; and Olive Behrendt, a patron of the Los Angeles Symphony. I would see a lot of Olive in later years in Venice. She had passed the city’s tough skipper’s exam and piloted her own motorboat through the baffling shallows of the lagoon. A heart attack eventually landed her in Venice’s hospital, where she died alone and neglected in a common ward. There were others, but I have forgotten who they were and there is no one left alive from that evening whom I could ask.
Danny never came to the table. He cooked a dish that his Chinese assistant served to us, and while we were eating, he sat in a pantry pulling hard on his pipe. When the assistant told him we had finished, he prepared another dish, and again he retired, through to the end of dinner. I wish I’d had the nerve to ask him when and what he ate, but Danny didn’t respond gently to interrogation. My memories of food are some of my sharpest, and they go back to the earliest moments of my conscious life, yet while I recall being happy at Danny’s dinner, I don’t remember a single dish I had. It had been a long, restless, and anomalous day whose happenings, at its end, had become hazy.
My greatest concern, whenever I wake up in the morning away from home, is where and how soon I am going to get a cup of coffee. I had been lodged in Dena’s room upstairs, and when I came out of my sleep early that morning, I wrapped a robe around me and I tiptoed quietly downstairs, headed for the kitchen. Danny was already there, blowing huge clouds of smoke from his pipe. “It’s about time
Danny Kaye comes to class.
you came down,” he said. “We have got a lot to do. We are going to make pasta and fegato alla veneziana” (sautéed liver and onions Venetian style). We cooked and finished lunch barely in time for me to make the flight to New York.
The next time I heard from Danny, I was teaching a class in my apartment. One of the students was Pamela Fiori, today the editor in chief of Town & Country magazine. She was then on the staff of Travel & Leisure magazine, for which she was taping the lesson. “What are you doing?” said Danny on the phone.
“I am teaching.”
“What are you teaching?”
“I am making pasta, a roast of veal, sautéed vegetables, and marinated oranges.”
“What kind of sauce do you have on the pasta?”
I told him.
“How do you make the veal?”
“Where are you, Danny?” I asked.
“In New York.”
“Look, I am in class now and I can’t talk. If you really want to know what I am cooking, come over.”
His apartment, at the Sherry-Netherland, was not too far from ours, and in a few minutes, he was at my door. I had never had him in a class, and I was concerned that he might distract us with his routines. I shouldn’t have worried. He was quiet, attentive, and helpful. But he did get an opportunity to do an unscripted number. I was demonstrating the Italian method of cooking a roast on top of the stove. There were six students crowding around me in the kitchen, plus Danny, plus my corpulent new assistant, Maria. The wall telephone rang. He asked if he could answer it for me. “Yes, please,” I said. Pamela kept her tape recorder running and the following is a transcript of Danny’s side of that phone conversation:
Allo? Eh? Yah, mah, whosa callin?
Wha, whazza your name?
Misses Horowis? En you lika to talk to Misses Hazan?
You wanta ask a question about the cookoobook?
Ehh, today sheeza very busy now, yah, if you aska me I will be able to tell you.
Oh, in da recipe where you hava da meat sauce bolognes?
You mada da sauce?
Izza too salty?
Well, in dat case you want me to tell you what to do?
Why it waza too salty?
Eh, you puta two teaspoon of salt?
Ahah! Ehh, three-quarters pounda meat en two teaspoon salt is too mucha salt? Oh my!
I tell you whacha do, Misses Horowis. You hava . . . you hava kosher salt?
Izza da big salt . . . you hava dat?
Now da next time you maka dis dish you taka four teaspoons of salt. Four! Put three teaspoons in a cuppa water and put it in de iceabox. Use half a teaspoona salt in de, in de sauce, en, iffa not too salty, putta little more salt, if not throw da water with da salt into da sink en den it will not be too salty.
Two teaspoona regular salt. I think datsa mistake. Yes. No, no in da book, izza mistake of da salt you are using. You’re using too salty salt. There are different kinds of salt, you know. You can buy salty salt and not-so-salty salt.
Iffa you go to the place and you aska, “Mister, I lika to hava some salt, but not too salty,” en den dey give dis, en den you can use two teaspoons.
It came outa nice? Ehh, you see Misses Horowis, yourra smart lady. Whatsa nice Jewish lady makin wit Italian food?
Aha! You see, mah, you not using da right salt! Kosher salt, dat izza da one, izza not too salty. Ma, if you usa no kosher salt, if you usa just kinda salt [mumbles] . . . aha, aha?
It say in da recipe two teaspoons of salt? Eh, heh . . . Misses Horowis, I lika to ask you a question, when you cook, you taste? Mah, when you taste, you finda izza too salty, and no usa so much!
Yeh, datsa right, you put a potato in de thing, if izza too salty, when it finishes throw outa da sauce an eata da potato.
Eheh . . . eheh . . . eheh . . . eheh . . . ahah . . . ahah . . . izza nice. I will teller becoz she willa be very happy to know dat you maka da sauce now.
All right. Bye bye, en tank you.
I laughed along with the others while wondering if it was my accent that Danny was mimicking. “Is that how I sound to others?” I thought. It is true that sometimes people misunderstood me, but I am not sure the fault was always mine. I was teaching a dessert, and when I asked a student to separate two eggs that had been put on the table, she just moved them apart. “Is it me or is it her?” I asked myself. “Isn’t ‘separate’ the correct word?” When your grip on a language is uncertain, it is easy to think that you are the one who has slipped.
I had a call one morning from a woman at Giuliano’s school who said she was organizing an event for parents and children.
“There is going to be a buffet,” she said, “and I was hoping that you could contribute a dish.”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Could you bring some Swedish meatballs?”
“Oh, I don’t know what they are.”
“Can you make a tuna casserole?”
“I am afraid not.”
“How about a chicken casserole?”
“I don’t even know what you mean by ‘casserole.’”
“Well, all right,” she said, sounding somewhat cross. “Can you contribute a dozen bottles of Coke?”
“Certainly.”
“Can you bring them next Thursday evening?”
“I’ll have to send them with someone, because on Thursday evening I have a cooking class.”
“Of course, I understand. I hope you are making progress.”
On another occasion, I was giving a demonstration class at Boston University with a small tasting. The tasting portions were small, but the audience was large. I had a lot of cooking to do and a lot of prepping. It was my custom, in such circumstances, to cook everything in full view of the audience, but to complete all but a small part of the prepping backstage in advance, keeping the lesson within reasonable time limits. That evening in Boston I was doing a fish stew with squid, and I had earlier held back just enough squid to use for the prepping demonstration. I had put it away in the refrigerator in a steel bowl filled with cold water. As I was getting ready to start, one of the assistants asked me whether she was to leave the squid in the refrigerator. “No,” I said. “Keep it outside.” When the moment came to show how to prep squid, I asked the assistant to bring me the bowl. I was surprised to see her leave the auditorium, but she returned quickly.
“It’s gone!” she cried.
“What�
��s gone?” I asked.
“The squid. I put it where you told me, and it’s gone, it’s not there anymore.”
“Where did you put it?”
“Where you told me, outside.”
“Where outside?”
“In the parking lot.”
It didn’t seem possible. “In the parking lot? Why the parking lot?”
“Well, Marcella, you said outside, and ‘outside’ means outside of the building, which is where the parking lot is.”
Victor and I hardly ever speak anything but Italian to each other. Somehow, one day, when we were discussing what I was going to teach the next day, I slipped into the language of the lesson, and I said at one point, “I am going to show them how to screw the shrimp.”
“Say that again,” Victor said.
I repeated the words.
“And you have been saying it all this time?” he asked.
“Sure.”
“And no one has ever made a comment?”
“No, why, what’s wrong with it?”
I never tried to use the word “skewer” again. I showed students how to make a brochette of shrimp.
The classes had begun to attract an ever more interesting group of students. A few were professionals, sometimes even too professional. Gael Greene arrived to take a pasta class equipped with a formidable array of knives. “You don’t need knives for pasta, Gael,” I said. “You need good hands and a rolling pin.” Men began to come to the classes. Jamie Niven, Ronald Lauder, Michael Thomas were among the ones I remember. Ronald was the most carefully dressed man I have ever had in class, or that I have ever known, perhaps. He was often going to or coming from a formal event, and then he would come in his dinner jacket. In one class, I had both James Beard and Joel Grey, colossal Jim and doll-like Joel, working side by side. Italian cooking was catching on with a rush, but the markets that were essential to it were missing still. Every time I started a lesson I would think, “If only I could have gone with the students to a real Italian market this morning, if only they could see what our vegetables are like, our fish, our tiny lambs; if only we had quality olive oil to cook with, and eggs with sunset-red yolks for our pasta.” The only way to do it would have been to take the class to Italy. And then, it seemed so obvious: Of course, I must take the class to Italy. I discussed it with Victor. He was always ready to consider any plan that would involve going to Italy. He said, “Yes, yes, yes! Go to Italy, go this summer, and see how it can be done.”
Bologna
1975-1987
PRIMO GRASSI AND I lived, played, and grew up a few houses apart on the same street in Cesenatico. He lives there still, in his childhood home. After the war, like many Italian intellectuals of his generation, he joined the Communist Party, a party that so dominated the administrative affairs of my native Emilia-Romagna that its capital city, Bologna, was dubbed la rossa, Bologna “the red.” Primo was in charge of tourist affairs, an important position in the busy resort area of which Cesenatico was part.
At the end of Giuliano’s spring term, I went back to Cesenatico with him. I told my mother I had come to see Primo about setting up a cooking school in town for my American students. She thought it was the most implausible scheme she had ever heard. She lived another twenty-one years, to the age of 101, and to the end, she never really got the point of her university-educated daughter’s cooking career.
Primo didn’t think any better of my project. “Sei matta?” (“Are you crazy?”) he said. “You expect people to cross the ocean and come to Cesenatico to learn how to make ragù, meat sauce?” The town owned several buildings that could have accommodated a teaching kitchen, but Primo wouldn’t consider it. Romagnoli, the natives of my area, are famous for their stubbornness, but if Primo was a Romagnolo, I was a Romagnola, and no less stubborn than he. When I insisted that I could make my idea work and that it would draw a desirable class of tourists to the region, he said, “Va bene, okay. The man you should talk to is Gianpaolo Testa. You may be able to convince him. I’ll give you an introduction.” “Testa? Where is he?” “In Bologna.”
My first memories of Bologna were the traumatic ones of my childhood and of the operations to save my right arm, but they did not darken my feelings now for the warmhearted and warm-looking city I had come back to. Bologna is most beautiful at sunset. The prevalent building material is red brick, which lights up, at the end of the day, with a scarlet glow that some liked to interpret as nature’s endorsement of the city’s political affiliation. La rossa is just one of Bologna’s sobriquets. La dotta, “the learned,” is another, a reference to its university, Europe’s oldest. Bologna is also known as la grassa, “the fat,” in affectionate recognition of the native elements of its rich cuisine, the butter, the cream, the Parmigiano, the prosciutto, the mortadella, the zampone and cotechino, the handmade egg pasta.
Primo’s introduction got me an appointment with Gianpaolo Testa, the president of Bologna’s department of tourism. He had his office in a modern building that had replaced one of the older structures destroyed during the air raids of the Second World War. He rose and came briskly around his large desk to greet me. A well-nourished man, he had a ruddy complexion, wavy brown hair, a smile lacking a tooth or two, and quick, compelling eyes. I told him my story, describing how I had ended up in New York and how I had gone from teaching science to teaching cooking. I had brought a copy of my cookbook and a stack of newspaper and magazine articles. I laid out the plan I had of leading my students to the markets, the vineyards, the restaurants, the cheese makers, the prosciutto curers, and of setting up a kitchen where they could cook Italian food with the fresh, native ingredients they had seen in the market. He was fascinated and listened without interrupting, which is unusual for an Italian. I couldn’t have placed my hopes in better hands. Testa had entrepreneurial drive and the political connections to make it fruitful. He loved and understood food. He lost no time in agreeing that my proposal could create a new and welcome flow of visitors to Bologna.
“When do you want to start?” he asked.
“Next summer.”
“What do you need?”
“A kitchen and a place where the students can stay.”
“You will have them,” he said. “Go back to New York and get yourself organized. I will let you know very quickly what I have found.”
Testa telephoned at the end of that summer. “Mail your announcement,” he said. “I have a hotel that will set aside rooms for your students and will provide the kitchen.”We had a substantial list of people who, during the previous five years, had inquired about or come to my classes in New York and in California, or attended my demonstrations around the country. Victor and I worked on a general description of the courses in Bologna, and we put it into a letter that we mailed to our list, offering three one-week courses in the summer of 1976. When we dropped the envelopes into the box at the post office, I wondered if I had been too optimistic and if we would hear from enough people to be able to go through with the project. We had the answer in just a few days, when every course was fully subscribed.
I was anxious to see the hotel and the kitchen that Testa had found, but Victor and I couldn’t leave New York yet: It was high season for Victor’s business, Giuliano was in school, and my own classes at home were filled until the end of May. My Neapolitan friend Claudia was going home at Christmas, and she volunteered to go to Bologna and inspect the premises for me. The hotel, the Milano-Excelsior, was across the street from the railway station. It had a four-star rating. Claudia reported that the rooms were very comfortable, with new furniture, marble floors, and good private baths. She also brought back a floor plan of the kitchen, which looked spacious. It was a professional kitchen from before the war that she thought would work well for me, a vintage kitchen, she said, with many burners, two ovens, and a lot of counter space for the students to work on.
At the beginning of June, Victor, Giuliano, and I flew to Italy. We had an appointment with Testa at the Milano-Excelsior,
where he introduced us to Signor Gallieri, the director of the hotel, a tall, bony, glum-looking man. He escorted us to our room, a sunny and commodious double with a large bath. It was nice, but I was aching to see the kitchen. Gallieri explained that it was in the hotel next door, the Hotel Bologna, which belonged to the same family that owned the Milano-Excelsior. The Bologna had been closed for several years, he said, and the kitchen, which was about forty years old, might need some sprucing up. I shouldn’t worry about that, he added, because he had a skilled crew working for him that, if necessary, could rebuild the whole kitchen in no time.
Gallieri let Victor and me into the shuttered Bologna, followed by his two-man crew, Testa with his assistant, and an architect friend of Testa’s who would provide technical advice, if it were required. We walked into the kitchen and I tried not to believe what I was seeing. Everything was covered by grime a decade old or more. The once-white enamel of the cabinets and oven doors was chipped and rusted. I opened one of the oven doors and it came unhinged. Corroded metal fittings crumbled at the touch. The white-tiled walls and floor had almost as many gaps as tiles, and most of the tiles that remained were cracked, the cracks black with petrified dirt. The icebox could have been exhibited in a museum of early kitchen equipment. “É impossibile!” (“This is impossible!”) I said. “Don’t be discouraged,” Gallieri said. “My men can clean everything up, replace the missing tiles, repair the oven doors and anything else that needs to be fixed in plenty of time for your class.” I wasn’t discouraged. I was desperate. The kitchen was beyond reviving; it had been dead too long. There was a dirty old wooden chair by the door and I dropped onto it, barely suppressing tears. I saw my career crumbling like the equipment in that kitchen. The trailblazing venture that so many in the food world had been talking about was ending in failure before its start. The students who were enrolled in the first week would be coming over in not too many days, some of them might be traveling in Europe already, and I might not even be able to alert them in time that there was no kitchen, that there would be no classes, no cooking adventure for them in Italy. I moaned because I couldn’t speak. Testa came over and put a hand on my shoulder. “Please,” he said, “it’s not hopeless. I have an idea. I am going to make a few calls and by tomorrow I’ll let you know what we can do.”
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