The Remarkable Life Story of the Woman Who Started Out Teaching Science in a Small Town in Italy, but Ended Up Teaching America How to Cook Italian
Widely credited with introducing proper Italian food to the English-speaking world, Marcella Hazan is known as America's godmother of Italian cooking. Raised in Cesentatico, a quiet fishing town on the northern Adriatic Sea, she'd eventually have her own cooking schools in New York, Bologna, and Venice, where she would teach students from around the world to appreciate-and produce-the homemade pasta, rustic soups, deeply satisfying roasts and stews, pure seafood dishes, and the fresh vegetables dressed with olive oil that Italians eat. She'd write bestselling and award-winning cookbooks, and collect invitations to cook at top restaurants around the world. She would have thousands of loyal students, and readers so devoted they'd name their daughters Marcella. Her fans will be as surprised and delighted b how all this came to be as Marcella herself has been.
Marcella's story begins not in Italy but in Alexandria, Egypt, where she spent her early childhood and where she fell on the beach and broke her arm-an accident that would hardly register for a child today, but which altered the course of her life. After nearly losing her arm to poor medical treatment, she was taken back to her father's native Italy for surgery. There the family would remain. Her teenage year coincided with World War II and the family relocated temporarily to Lake Garada, which they, not they, not anticipating that it would become one of war's greatest targets when both Mussolini and German High Command established their headquarters there, thought would be a safe haven. After years of privation and nightly bombings, Marcella was finally Fulfilling her ambition to become a doctor and professor of science when she Victor, the love of life. After their marriage, they moved to America, where Marcella knew not a word of English or-what's more surprising-a single recipe. She began to recall and attempt to re-create the flavours of her homeland. After women with whom she took a Chinese cooking class in the early sixties asked her to teach them Italian cooking, she began to give them lessons in her tiny New York kitchen. Soon after, Craig Claiborne invited himself to lunch, and the rest is history. Amacord means 'I remember' in Marcella's native Romangolo dialect. In these pages, Marcella, now eighty-four, looks back on the adventures of a life lived for pleasure and a love of teaching. Throughout, she entertains the reader with stories of the humorous, sometimes bizarre, twists and turns that brought her love, fame, and a change to forever change the way we eat.
