Marcella Hazan
| Marcella Hazan | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born | Marcella Polini April 15, 1924 Cesenatico |
| Died | September 29, 2013 (aged 89) Longboat Key, Florida |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Citizenship | American |
| Alma mater | University of Ferrara |
| Genre | cookbooks |
| Notable awards | James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award |
| Spouse | Victor Hazan (1955–2013; her death) |
| Children | Giuliano |
Marcella Hazan (née Polini; April 15, 1924 – September 29, 2013) was an Italian-born cooking writer whose books were published in English. Her cookbooks are credited with introducing the public in the United States and Britain to the techniques of traditional Italian cooking. She was considered by chefs and fellow food writers to be one of the foremost authorities on Italian cuisine.
Hazan was born in 1924 in the town of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna. She earned a doctorate in natural sciences and biology from the University of Ferrara. In 1955 she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-born, New York-raised Sephardic Jew who subsequently gained fame as a wine writer, and the couple moved to New York City a few months later.
Hazan had never cooked before her marriage. As she recounted in the introduction to her 1997 book Marcella Cucina,
... there I was, having to feed a young, hard-working husband who could deal cheerfully with most of life's ups and downs, but not with an indifferent meal. In Italy, I would not have wasted time thinking about it. My mother cooked, my father cooked, both my grandmothers cooked, even the farm girls who came in to clean could cook. In the kitchen of my New York apartment there was no one.
She began by using cookbooks from Italy, but then realized that she had an exceptionally clear memory of the flavours she had tasted at home and found it easy to reproduce them herself. "Eventually I learned that some of the methods I adopted were idiosyncratically my own," she recalled, "but for most of them I found corroboration in the practices of traditional Italian cooks."
Hazan began giving cooking lessons in her apartment, and opened her own cooking school, The School of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1969. In the early 1970s, Craig Claiborne, who was then the food editor of the New York Times, asked her to contribute recipes to the paper. She published her first book, The Classic Italian Cook Book, in 1973. In 1980, having been published in a version adapted for a British readership by Anna Del Conte, it won an André Simon Award. A sequel, More Classic Italian Cooking, followed in 1978; the two were collected in one volume, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1992. Her 1997 book Marcella Cucina won the James Beard Foundation book award for Best Mediterranean Cookbook and the Julia Child Award for Best International Cookbook the following year. She wrote in Italian and her books were translated by her husband.
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