Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  Every year in Hong Kong, the Mandarin Hotel organized a gastronomic fortnight that featured the cooking of a well-known chef, invariably French. Peter, whom the hotel consulted periodically, suggested they try Italian cooking for a change, and he recommended that they get in touch with me. The Mandarin’s executive chef, a Belgian named Michel, and the hotel’s food and beverage manager, whose name I can’t recall, came to Venice to meet me. Michel was charming, easy, and relaxed, with a young man’s open smile. We had a few meals together, some at home, some in restaurants, and agreed on a long list of possible dishes and the ingredients that Michel would have to import. The following spring we were at the Mandarin. Never in my career have I been favored with such a delightful business arrangement. In addition to my fee, there were first-class round-trip tickets to Hong Kong for Victor and me; a three-day stopover in Tokyo to recover from jet lag; a suite at the Mandarin, where we ended up staying for more than a month; and a ten-day stay at its sister hotel in Bangkok, the Oriental, to unwind before returning to Venice.

  I had work to do at the Mandarin, but we had time to explore a different part of Asia from the one we had known almost twenty years earlier. It did not feel as far from our Eurocentric world as Japan had in the 1960s. Hong Kong was still a British colony then, hence there was no language barrier for English speakers. Its most notable buildings were the work of European architects, and its fashion was either French or Italian. Joyce Ma, a Hong Kong society woman, had a string of boutiques so crammed with French and Italian designer names that you might have been shopping in Paris or Milan, while the famous tailors and shirtmakers took pride in their English fabrics. Joyce became a good friend, but what shopping we did was of another sort. Victor presented me with a portable memento of our trip, a necklace of jade and Chinese lapis made by Kai Yin Lo, a well-known designer of such desirable things. From a dealer in Kowloon, we bought what is still one of our most treasured objects, a seventeenth-century bronze Laotian rain drum. Poking around in various small shops, we came away with Chinese ink paintings, ceramics, and household objects, such as an antique brush pot to hold my wooden spoons in the kitchen. Ever since, these beautiful things have been a prominent part of the places we’ve lived, to the puzzlement of many of our visitors who cannot reconcile our Italian origin with a predilection for Asian art and crafts.

  What we loved most, however, we couldn’t carry away: the restaurants and the food markets. I love Chinese food nearly as much as my own native cooking, and eating out in Hong Kong was a dream that kept coming true nearly every day. Whenever we chose to eat at the hotel, we were welcome at the Mandarin’s own Chinese restaurant, the Man Wah, but we explored other restaurants, and teahouses, and the cavernous mah-jongg halls clattering with action at a dozen or more tables. We were expertly escorted by Kai Yin Lo, whose mother had founded Hong Kong’s first cooking school; by Joyce Ma; and by two well-informed young international couples living in Hong Kong to whom we had been introduced. One was half French, half Chinese; the other half Austrian, half American. Allowing ourselves to be led by those who knew the way, every time we got up from the table we felt that we had just had the best of all possible meals.

  One of the most exquisite meals, however, was memorable less for the food than for the encounter associated with it, an encounter that we have put into our “The Inscrutable Orient” file, inasmuch as we have never found an explanation for it. A New York friend of ours, Max Pine, who was then the president of Restaurant Associates, had suggested we get in touch with the owner of a group of regional restaurants in Hong Kong. Each restaurant had a regional

  In Hong Kong, 1985

  name, such as Shanghai or Canton, followed by the word “Garden.” The owner’s name was Wu. “He’ll be delighted to meet you,” Max assured me. “Wu has a beautiful boat, and I’ll write to him and suggest that he take you for a sail around the bay.” When we called Mr. Wu, he said nothing about the boat. He instructed us instead to show up at a restaurant he named, on a day and at a time that he determined. He added that we could bring friends. The Austrian-American couple was the one we chose to go with. Maya, a raven-haired beauty, was, like us, interested in Asian crafts, and Clint, her American husband, was an insurance executive who had been in Asia for several years.

  Victor approached the restaurant’s reservations desk and asked for Mr. Wu, which led to a routine reminiscent of Abbot and Costello:

  “Who?” asked the woman at the desk.

  “Mr. Wu.”

  “Mr. who?”

  “Wu.”

  “Who?”

  Chinese is a language whose meanings vary according to subtle inflections in tone, and evidently, Victor was stuck on the wrong one.

  We were eventually shown to a table and our host soon joined us. He must have taken an immediate dislike to us. He sat dourly throughout the excellent meal he ordered for us, and lectured us, with unconcealed contempt for our ignorance, on Chinese flavors and Chinese table practices. There was a curt leave-taking at the end of the dinner. We didn’t mention the boat. He didn’t suggest meeting again. The following day, Victor and I were walking along one of the elevated passages that connect some of the downtown buildings when we saw Mr. Wu approaching from the opposite end. As he came abreast of us, we nodded. Mr. Wu walked past, making it obvious that to him we were invisible.

  I was given ten days to work with Michel on the menu for the Mandarin’s first Italian Fortnight. I had come prepared to help him produce seventy dishes, which we trimmed down to sixty. I was in the kitchen from eight thirty to eleven in the morning and from three to six in the afternoon, when the cooks were not filling orders for the restaurants. I prepped and cooked each dish while Michel and his two principal sous chefs, one Chinese, the other French, looked on. Michel translated for the Chinese chef. I taught them how to turn flour and boiled potatoes into fluffy, weightless gnocchi, something that even good Italian restaurants rarely do well. The pastry chef learned how to roll out handmade pasta on his first try. Michel was quick at grasping and responding, and we made steady progress. Many ingredients had to be imported and almost all ar-rived

  With Chef Michel in the kitchen of the Mandarin Hotel, Hong Kong

  in good condition, but in the case of the small-leaf basil for our pesto, which was flown in at considerable cost from the Italian Riviera, more than half of it was spoiled.

  Two days before opening night, Michel asked to talk to me privately in his office. I had told him originally that as soon as a pasta dish was ready, it couldn’t sit; it had to be served. He did not see how the cook at the pasta station could handle orders for up to six different pasta dishes at the same time. It was easier to demonstrate than to explain it in words, so we both went to the kitchen, where I showed him how it could be done. On the first day, Michel was at the pasta station, where he cooked all the orders for pasta himself. The kitchen brigade was flabbergasted. No one had ever before seen Michel cook on the line. An executive chef for a food operation as large as the Mandarin’s, in whose three restaurants and employee dining room thousands of meals were served each day, must only direct, because he cannot spare time to cook. “Marcella,” he said, “I had to prove to myself that it could be done and show my man how it could be done. Now I don’t need to worry.” I have never known a chef so modest, so courteous with his staff, so painstaking, and of such constantly agreeable humor.

  I had one slight and short-lived confrontation, and predictably, it was with the French sous chef. The French like their fowl chewy and underdone; Italians like it cooked through and through until it comes softly off the bone. When the Frenchman read in my instructions for the squab dish that it had to cook at least forty-five minutes, he exclaimed, “Ce n’est pas possible!” “My dear,” I said, “not only is it possible, it is exactly the way you are going to cook it.”

  Thanks to Michel, and the extraordinary intelligence and discipline of his Chinese staff, the Italian Fortnight was a great success. I came down every evening in one of my
best gowns and, before going out myself for dinner, circulated around the tables. My greatest compliment came from an Italian couple. They were from Genoa, where pesto originated, and they had ordered gnocchi with pesto. “Signora,” they said, “le dovrebbero fare un monumento” (“They should build you a statue”). “We would never have believed that in Hong Kong we could have pesto as good as the one we make at home.” They could not have imagined what it had cost us to produce it. The demand for tables was so great that the Fortnight was extended to three weeks, and without even thinking it over, I accepted an invitation to stay in Hong Kong an extra week.

  Three years later, I was on a new continent, but in not wholly endearing circumstances. My third cookbook, Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, had just appeared in Australia, and I was there as the guest of its British publisher, Macmillan. As it happened, I was more of a paying guest—paying in kind, that is. When Macmillan’s Australian representative had arranged for me to go there for two weeks, he had asked that I make myself available for demonstrations to the press and on television. Subsequently, I learned that he had booked me to teach classes offered to the general public, a week of them in Sydney and a week in Melbourne. “We shall split the fees,” he said, “and our share will in part defray the cost of your stay.” I had never even been asked what I charged. “How much are they paying?” I asked. “The standard amount for cooking classes here,” he said. The figure was a fraction of my established teaching fee, even without calculating that I was to keep only half of it.

  “I am not going to do it,” I said.

  “Oh, you can’t get out of it. We have tied in the book’s promotion with these classes, the schools have publicized them, and they are fully booked.”

  “Well then, if I have to teach the classes, I am not going to surrender any part of the fee.” And that is how it stood. I asked if there was going to be time for me to see something of Australia. “You have both weekends,” the man said.

  I had been so eager to go to Australia. The frequency with which I found Australians in my classes in Bologna and Venice surprised me, when I considered how far they had come and how small their country’s population was. Their presence always added enthusiasm and energy to the class and encouragement to my efforts. I had expected to like their country very much. I hadn’t expected to see little more than the inside of two cooking schools. What I did have an opportunity to enjoy was the seafood, starting with my first morning, when, even before I had unpacked, I was rushed to the glorious seafood market in Sydney to choose the fish for my classes. Twenty years and a great many good meals have come between then and now, but I can still clearly recall the day that Victor and I sat down to a whole large mud crab apiece and quietly demolished them, extracting and dispatching every succulent shred of flesh. Crab is my favorite crustacean, and I have feasted on crabs nearly everywhere I have been, in Venice on granzevola, granciporro, and moleche, on Dungeness in Seattle, on blue crabs in Long Island, on the stone crab claws of my Florida coast, on crabs whose acquaintance was too brief to remember their names. None has surpassed and few have compared with that Australian mud crab.

  The most enjoyable parts of the voyage to Australia were the stopovers. We interrupted our flight in Singapore, where we hopped on an Indonesian plane to get to Bali. In Singapore, we allowed ourselves several days to visit people we knew. A member of Venice’s Rocca family, with whom we were acquainted, had married Alessandro Vattani, Italy’s ambassador to Singapore. We also knew Beatrice Tao, a regal, and regally accoutered, Chinese woman who had come to Venice with one of her daughters to take my class at the Cipriani hotel. Another of her daughters, who lived in Hong Kong with her French husband, had often been our dining companion and mentor when we were there.

  People who welcome you to their country and are proud to exhibit its treasures may introduce you to its monuments, to the handsome streets and charming neighborhoods of its cities, to its spectacular coastline, to the poetry of its landscape, or to the majesty of its forests. Singapore lacks all of these, but that is no impediment to its hospitality, because in their place it has food—food so unfailingly wonderful in all its manifestations that I have known no place to equal it. The Vattanis and their friends and various members of the Tao clan formed two separate task forces with a single strategy: to make sure that we tasted everything and that we never stopped long enough to lose momentum. An afternoon nap, a swim in the hotel’s pool, and a massage filled the interval that separated lunch from dinner. After-dinner conversation at the home of one of our hosts allowed us to recover in order to join the feasting at Singapore’s greatest attraction, its late-night open-air food stalls.

  The food of the stalls, although different in content and variety, was not dissimilar in spirit from our cicheti, the little plates of tasty things: fresh sardines, small soles, mussels, tiny octopi, sausages, meatballs, or eggs, served with soft or grilled polenta in the bacari, the wine bars of Venice. But Singapore’s brightly lit stalls stay open late, whereas the bacari do most of their business in the light of morning, when Venetians prefer to do their drinking. Moreover, the stalls congregate gregariously outdoors, while bacari retreat behind closed doors and are scattered around the city at a distance from one another. You are not likely to have fruit in a Venetian wine bar, but the Singapore stalls glory in their honeyed tropical fruits. Of these, however, there is one that even devotees might not describe as honeyed. It is durian, which, when its ripeness is most expressive, smells to some like carrion. It was unlawful, we were told, to bring it into any enclosed public space. To my husband, durian’s texture, taste, and smell were those of the funkiest cheese imaginable, to which add decadent sweetness. I recoiled from it, but Victor loved it, and at the end of a day long in gastronomic exploits, he ate it greedily over butcher paper standing on a street corner.

  Some years later, when Darina Allen asked us to come to Ballymaloe, her school in Ireland, we accepted the invitation notwithstanding the discouraging descriptions we had heard of Irish food. To our surprise, the ingredients we found were superb. The seafood—I remember the Dublin Bay prawns (known as scampi in Italy), the turbot, the hake, the monkfish—was equal to the best and freshest we had ever had on the Adriatic. The cheeses, breads, and jams were wonderful. To this day, it is Irish butter that I use in my kitchen. We didn’t know any of that, however, before going. What we knew was that we loved Darina, and we were grateful that she had forgiven the hard time she had had one day in Bologna when she had been our student.

  In Bologna, it had been one of Victor’s responsibilities to accompany the class on its field trips and to maintain strict observance of the schedules we had so laboriously worked out. Our longest trip was the one we made to Parma to observe the entire production cycle of Parmigiano Reggiano cheese, an eight-hundred-year-old process. We had arranged with a dairy to hold back, in the morning, a batch of the milk from which they made the cheese, so that the students could watch it being cooked in copper cauldrons of ancient design. They would then have the opportunity to follow the subsequent steps in the cycle, to see the cylindrical mold that shaped the soft mass of the previous day’s cheese, a two-day-old cheese being unmolded, a firm month-old round soaking in its brine bath, and a year-old seventy-five-pound wheel of Parmigiano aging in the cathedral-like space of the maturation vaults. The class had to be on the bus no later than eight A.M. to leave for the one-hour drive to Parma where the dairy master was waiting. Victor had announced on the previous evening that the bus would pull out at exactly eight A.M., whether or not every student was on it.

  No one had ever been late for that appointment—except for Darina. Diligent, dependable, respectful Darina. She had been in the lobby on time, but then she had returned to her room to look for her camera. Victor didn’t know. When she returned, the bus had left. Poor Darina. She hired a taxi to take her to the dairy, but when she got there, the demonstration was over and the class was gone. She continued by taxi to all the other stops on the tour, always arriving too
late. Fortunately, she did make it in time to the restaurant by the Po River where a midday banquet in grand Parma style awaited the class, and applause awaited her.

  Darina and her husband, Tim, met us at Cork Airport and drove us first to her mother-in-law’s inn at Ballymaloe, where we would be staying. When we had checked in, she asked, “Would you like to see the school now?” “Certainly,” I said. She drove us to a large property in the country. “It was Tim’s farm,” she said. The stables had been converted into small but charming rustic rooms for resident students. Chickens scampered over the grounds. A disused truck had been filled with straw and turned into their roost. We passed by row after row of vegetables. “It’s where we grow the produce for our classes,” Darina said. We walked to the large main building. As I remember it, the first floor had the students’ spacious kitchen, with six or more four-burner stoves; the teachers’ room; a well-equipped pantry; an auditorium with closed-circuit T.V. monitors for lectures and demonstrations; and a beautiful dining veranda with many tables facing a flower garden. The second floor held a splendid library, Darina’s office, and the administrative offices.

  I had never seen a cooking school like it, and I was both awed and made uneasy by its scale. I had said that the classes I would teach would permit full participation by the students.