Frankly, I looked forward to their going out of town because it gave me a hugely welcome day off. Class days at the Cipriani were very long for me. The lessons started at five thirty in the evening, and with dinner at the end, they lasted four hours, and occasionally longer. While the students had the day free to explore Venice, I had to organize the lesson, do the marketing, look after personal matters at home, and make a good lunch, because it would be my only meal of the day.
My curriculum at the Cipriani was still the basic one I had developed when I taught in New York. Within the context of a menu, I explored Italian cooking through both its classic structure and its improvisational opportunities. Victor conducted his wine tastings. There were no shortcuts. But there was an aura about the courses at the Cipriani that set them apart from the cooking schools I conducted elsewhere. No one came to class in shorts or jeans or T-shirts. It would have been unthinkable to appear in such garb in that hotel in the evening. The men wore jackets, the women cocktail attire, and there were occasional displays of serious jewelry. By the glass wall overlooking the lagoon, the dining staff had set up a beautiful long banquet table laid with Cipriani linens, china, and crystal and exuberant flower arrangements. We served some of the dishes we made buffet-style from the cooking counter, but whenever it was more appropriate, I rang the dining room and a pair of uniformed waiters came up to take over the service.
Obviously, some of my students slipped more easily than others into the formal Venetian mode of the course at the hotel. A couple that fit into it with grace and good humor were Vincent Price and his wife, Coral Browne. Of all the students who have ever attended my classes, there are none whom I remember more fondly. Vincent was a marvelous gentleman, unaffectedly elegant in character no less than in dress. He was an accomplished cook who had written a substantial cookbook of his own. I believe that cooking and art—he
At the Cipriani kitchen with Simone Beck and Anne Willan. The man at my right is Natale Rusconi.
had majored in art history at Yale—engaged his feelings at a far deeper level than acting. He had formed so firm a bond with Coral that after she died of cancer, he continued to sign his Christmas cards “Vincent and Coral.”
Coral had a devastating wit. One of her remarks that dates to her earlier years in the theater has become legendary. She was with a troupe in England whose members, both female and male, were perplexed about the sexuality of one of the actors, a very handsome man. He appeared to have neither girlfriends nor boyfriends, nor any interest in acquiring either. “He’s asexual,” the director told Coral. “Some English men are like that.” “He’s only shy,” she replied. “I’ll bet you twenty pounds that I can draw him out of his shell.” The director accepted the wager, and after that evening’s performance, Coral and the actor went off together. When she came back the following day, Coral went to the director and said, “You owe me only eight pounds six.”
After the course, we continued to see Vincent and Coral at home in Venice, later on in the apartment we then kept in New York, and during book tours, in Beverly Hills. They were regulars at Spago, but Coral, who loved pizza, deplored Wolfgang Puck’s version with goat cheese. “Please, Wolfgang,” she said when he came to the table, “anything but goat cheese!” My feelings precisely. The year after Vincent died, I had a call from a woman who said she was Victoria Price, Vincent’s daughter. She was in Venice and she had something that, before he died, her father had asked her to bring me. It was his working copy of his own cookbook, an imposing tome, with many additional recipes stuffed between the leaves and the margins densely annotated in his hand.
The last class I taught at the Cipriani I did not teach alone. A few years earlier, I had met Nobu Matsuhisa at a Masters of Food and Wine event at the Highlands Inn in Carmel, California, where we had been invited to demonstrate some of our dishes. At that time, he had only a small restaurant in Beverly Hills called Matsuhisa. By the time he opened Nobu in New York, we had become good friends. I asked him if he had ever been in Venice. He said he had never been to Europe, but that he was hoping to go soon. “You must come to Venice then, and see our fish market,” I said. He did come, together with that marvelous wife and partner of his, Yoko. I took them to the fish market, which opened his eyes. He was fascinated to see live canoce there, which exist also in Japan, where they are called shako. Nobu, Yoko, Victor, and I spent several days together, eating out and cooking at home, and we had such a good time that we decided to organize an encore the following year.
I was working on a new cookbook and teaching many classes at home, which made it hard for me to continue teaching at the hotel. “I am going to teach one last class at the Cipriani; why don’t you come and we’ll do it together?” I said to Nobu. I asked my son to join us, and we worked out a program in which we each had a number to do. Giuliano, Nobu, and I taught a class on consecutive evenings, and on the final evening, we cooked together, producing an Italian-Japanese buffet to which the three of us contributed two or three dishes apiece. It was an immense success. More than forty people came, packing the terrace kitchen to capacity.
It was such a celebratory occasion, my farewell to the Cipriani classes, that we decided the welcome reception and dinner on the evening before the course should be in black tie. Our students had come from around the world, some of the women bringing exotic gowns. Yoko and another Japanese lady had spectacular kimonos, and there was a vaporous sari and a lustrous, richly embroidered, full-length black cheongsam. The glamorous spectacle contrasted with memories of the homey gatherings where my career had started, prepping vegetables with six matrons in cardigans around the din-ing
On the way to the fish market, stopping on the Rialto bridge with Nobu
table of a modest Fifty-fifth Street apartment in Manhattan. “There’s certainly been a major scene change,” I thought, “but as far as the substance of what I have been cooking and teaching, nothing has changed.” Nothing ever would.
Natale was not quite ready to accept the end of my classes for the hotel. “Can’t you think of some format where you don’t have to prepare or cook anything, where you just act as the hostess?” he asked me. Victor agreed. “Yes, let’s have other people do the cooking. It can be one of our friends in the kitchen of her palazzo, or a restaurateur friend taking the group into the kitchen of his restaurant. We can call the course ‘Behind the Scenes with Marcella Hazan.’” With that, I found myself bidding one more farewell to the Cipriani—and, if it hadn’t been for a fast-moving guest at our final dinner, possibly to my career or even my life.
We recruited a few of our friends who were good cooks, persuading them to bring our group into their kitchens, where they cooked some of their special dishes, which they then served in their dining rooms. The Cipriani provided service staff and logistical support. One of my favorite seafood restaurants of that period was Al Ponte del Diavolo, on the island of Torcello. Corrado, the manager-owner and a most accommodating man, agreed to have the chef demonstrate one of their specialties, which would then be included in the meal for our students. I was not required to do any cooking, but I was always present to translate, give full explanations of the procedures, and answer questions. Victor took the class for a day’s outing in Friuli, where they visited a small elite winery not generally open to visitors and then had the typical dishes of the region in a local restaurant. One of the men in the class is now a neighbor in Longboat Key, and he stills mentions the borlotti beans and barley soup he had that day.
For the last day of “Behind the Scenes,” I planned a grand finale in two parts. Piero Mainardis, a distinguished architect, and his wife, Silvana, a wine producer celebrated in Venice for her cooking, lived on the Grand Canal in the meticulously restored Palazzo Tiepolo. In the morning, Silvana would demonstrate in her palatial kitchen what she would cook for dinner. Dinner, in black tie, was served in the formal dining salon, which was lit only by candlelight. I wore a new gown for the occasion, with billowy green chiffon sleeves emerging from a long, narr
ow, vestlike tunic made from a piece of antique silk that Victor had bought in Thailand.
One of Silvana’s first courses was gnocchetti alle alghe, little gnocchi with seaweed. The recipe had come down from Silvana’s grandmother, who had trained a laborer engaged in clearing the banks of the canals to collect young, tender fronds of seaweed for her. Silvana got hers from a fisherman who, she said, thought it rather odd to cook with seaweed, but since he was being paid to procure it, he was happy to humor her.
There were candlesticks everywhere in the dining salon. If you have enough candles in a room, the illumination can be brilliant. The dinner was a huge success. The gnocchetti were delicious, tasting as though they had been made with a nuttier, brinier kind of spinach. I got up at the end, moving away from the table, to thank our hosts and to thank the participants. I had my evening bag in my hand, and I reached back toward a console behind me to put it down. I saw Victor, at the far end of the table, turning white. At that instant, a man who had been sitting beside me leaped out of his chair, overturning it, and rushed toward me, vigorously slapping my arm. In that moment, I noticed that the sleeve was smoking. Evidently, it had come too near one of the candles on the console. With his hands, the man quickly squelched the flames that were just starting to form. Silvana moistened his palms with aloe from a plant in the kitchen, but he did not seem to have been hurt. In what was now a one-sleeved dress, I returned to my farewell speech, adding a tribute to my savior, and with that, my final performance for the Cipriani came to a close.
We took possession of Mrs. Kaley’s apartment in April 1980, but it was more than two years before we obtained the permits we needed and completed the renovations we had decided on. In Venice, you cannot alter the configuration of a room in a historically registered building. Our kitchen was jammed in under the eaves of a corner of the roof, and to transform it to suit my requirements was a challenge for our ingenuity and that of our architect. We also found we had to install a modern heating system. When we’d walked through the apartment before the closing, Mrs. Kaley’s daughter Diana had shown us a contraption, explaining that to turn it on when it was cold, we had to turn a lever on it toward Finland, and turn it toward Africa to shut it off when it was hot. In the uncertainty about where either place lay with respect to the spot where we stood, we replaced the machinery with up-to-date gas boilers and a thermostat. We put in air-conditioning, hiding individual compressors for each room under the roof tiles. We had to rewire the apartment because the tangle of old wires was not up to code.
We could have stopped there. I would have. But Victor is a man who rearranges the furniture of a hotel room where he is going to spend two nights. His passion for altering and shaping the place where he lives had found in this apartment enough kindling to stoke it to fever heat. We had two bathrooms, neither of which he found suitable. The bathroom that was to be his had a tub. He wanted a stall shower. He didn’t just put in a stall shower; he chucked the tub and replaced the sink, the commode, Flora Kaley’s faux-silver fittings, and the tiles, and had the whole bathroom—the floor, the walls, and the interior of the shower—lined in marine mahogany. I was perfectly happy with my bathroom, which had a gorgeous cobalt-blue bathtub and tiny tiles that Flora had chosen because they reminded her of the colors of Monet’s lily ponds. He allowed me to keep the tub, but everything else had to go, and on the principle he enunciated that in a bathroom, what goes on the walls goes on the floor, he had it all lined—saving part of a wall for mirrors—in slabs of Portuguese marble shot with pink and pale blue. It was lovely, I must admit.
We moved in, in the fall of 1982, almost three years after the November afternoon on which we had first seen the apartment. I longed to return to the intimate format of the classes I had originally given in New York. Just six students and me, sitting around a table, preparing dinner together. For the time being I was committed to the large classes in Bologna and at the Cipriani, where I had to speak into a microphone clipped to my apron to make my low voice heard, but I knew that those were coming to the end of their time, and I had hoped that I could spend the final years of my teaching career in quieter circumstances at home. We offered our first classes at home the year after we moved in. We called them Master Classes, to suggest a close tie between teacher and student. At home, I was able to return to my favorite prepping position, sitting at a table. The kitchen had French doors that gave onto the large terrace, where we put a long table on which the students and I could work. What we didn’t know was that previous tenants were still at home in the terrace. Whenever I was doing a fish lesson, within seconds after I had put the fish on the table, a swarm of wasps tried to join the class. Victor became extraordinarily skillful at sucking them into a dust buster, using the narrow tube attachment. He soon followed them to their nest, inside one of the beams. He sealed it, and we were free of their company. In mild weather, if we didn’t have a class, it was at that prepping table that Victor and I had lunch alfresco.
The classes started at ten in the morning, and by the time we had finished eating what we had prepared, it was close to four in the afternoon. The students had to arrange for their own accommodations, and there were no excursions, except for the tour of the Rialto market with which I launched every course. At the end of the market tour, I wanted the students to taste a representative sample of the encyclopedic variety of seafood they had just seen. I usually arranged for them to have a banquet lunch at a restaurant called Da Fiore—which was able to serve them a dozen or more kinds of seafood prepared in traditional style.
Da Fiore’s tale is one of pluck, luck, and storybook success. It was once a grimy, working-class wine bar, whose sign is still nailed to the wall above the door. A very young couple, Maurizio and Mara—he may have been twenty, and she eighteen—came to Venice from the outlying farm country to find fortune. They found Da Fiore—it was for sale, they borrowed the money and bought it. The interior and the cuisine have since undergone several renovations, and both are quite chic these days. Then, both were very chaste.
We discovered Da Fiore soon after we had started coming to the Cipriani. What we liked immediately on entering the first time were the sounds of Venetian talk that filled the room. Venetians know fish. “If they come here to eat,” we thought, “could it be bad?” Not only was it not bad, it was pure and unforgettable. Thanks perhaps to her innocence of professional experience, to the artlessness of her youth, and certainly to her natural talent, what distinguished Mara’s cooking in those years was something ineffable that might be described as invisibility of the process, as the cook’s trust in the ability of the ingredients to speak for themselves, eliciting from
In Venice on the kitchen terrace, a quick consultation
them the purest, clearest, brightest flavors that they were capable of expressing.
We took not just our classes to Da Fiore, but also every food and wine person who came to visit us in Venice, from Julia Child, to Robert Mondavi, to Nobu. The visitor who proved most important to Da Fiore’s ascent was Patricia Wells. She had come to Venice twice, once to interview me for Metropolitan Home magazine, another time on holiday with her husband, Walter, and twice we took her to have Mara’s cooking. Eventually, Pat traveled the world for the International Herald Tribune to assemble a list of the ten restaurants she considered the best. When her list of the world’s ten best appeared, Da Fiore was on it. You can still eat exceptionally well at Da Fiore, if you have booked long in advance, but the sounds you are likely to hear from the other tables now are no longer those of the neighborhood, but those of the world.
My students feel very bad when they discover that my memories of them are usually vague. It happens again and again that someone will come up to my table at a restaurant, or stop me in the lobby of a theater, or park her cart alongside mine in a supermarket, to say, “Marcella! Remember me? I was in your class in Bologna.” “When?” “Twenty-five years ago.” How can I remember? She has had only one of me, but I have had a few thousand of her.
It has been ten years since I taught the last of my classes at home in Italy. Perhaps because there were never any more than six students in any of them, I can still clearly recollect some of the participants, although not their names necessarily. I recall the attractive young woman from Australia who lived on a ranch the size of Rhode Island. She lived there alone with twenty thousand cows and a few ranch hands. Her nearest neighbor lived six hundred miles away, she said. “What do you do if you need a doctor?” I asked. “That’s not a problem. We have a flying doctor who makes house calls. We get better attention out on the ranch than people in cities do.”
I am haunted by the memory of two women who were so determined to take the class that they ignored, in each case, a devastating and eventually fatal physical condition. One of them had advanced multiple sclerosis, yet she negotiated the eighty-two steps on our stairs all six mornings of the course. Another was anorexic. When she walked in the first day, I thought I was seeing an apparition from a horror movie, not an ordinary flesh-and-blood being. She tasted what we cooked in the minutest quantities imaginable, such as taking a single piece of penne pasta, dividing it in four, and eating one of the fourths. She loved to entertain, she said.
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