Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  There have always been men in my classes, but at home there seemed to have been more of them, and more doctors among them. One of them rescued me when I got stuck midway through the preparation of a dessert. I was making peach halves stuffed with amaretto cookies, which then I would cook on the charcoal grill we had in the terrace. Victor did all the marketing every morning before class, rising very early to be there when the Rialto market opened, bringing back vegetables, fruit, meat, or fish over four bridges and through many narrow streets at amazing speed. He was always home early enough for me to inspect and organize my ingredients before the students arrived. On the morning that I was doing peaches for dessert, I had asked for freestones, but what he had brought were clings. I tried to separate a peach into two halves free of the pit, but I ended up with useless shreds. One student, a distinguished, tall older man, volunteered to help. “You are welcome to try,” I said skeptically. He asked for a soup spoon. He slowly worked the spoon inside the peach, turning it steadily but with great delicacy. In not too long, he extracted the spoon, bearing the pit. The peach was intact. “Where did you learn to do that?” I asked. “In the hospital. It’s simple. It’s how I remove tumors from a brain.”

  Another brain surgeon from Chicago entertained us with his anecdotes. In one of the stories, he told us that one of his pastimes was owning a hot dog stand. Whenever he could, he loved working the stand himself. On one occasion, he saw a woman approaching whom he recognized as the daughter of someone on whose brain he had performed a long and complicated operation. He turned his head away when he handed her the hot dogs she had ordered, but she came closer to peer at him. He pulled his cap down lower over his face.

  “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he mumbled.

  “What is your name?”

  “Ummm, Lenny.”

  “Lenny?” She came closer. Her voice rose, “I know who you are! You operated on my mother!”

  I have never, in any of my own classes, given out printed recipes. If you give students a printed something, they will stop to read it and forget to pay attention to what you are doing or saying. If they take notes, however, that helps them focus on the lesson. Nearly all of my students kept a notebook, but there was one who took notes in the form of sketches, which he drew incessantly. He sketched the dishes, the ingredients, my silver flatware. I had hoped to add a page from his notebook to the illustrations in this memoir, but when I asked, he said he had hundreds of notebooks and had forgotten where he had stored the one from our cooking class. He was Norman Foster, Lord Foster now that Queen Elizabeth has bestowed a peerage on him. As one of the world’s most famous architects, his name should have been as familiar to his classmates as that of a rock star. It’s curious how few people read architectural news even

  Working under the eaves in my Venice kitchen

  when it lands on their paper’s front page. As soon as we had introduced ourselves to each other when we met in my sitting room, one of the other students asked, “What do you do, Norman?” “I am an architect.” “Do you have your own practice or do you work for someone?” “I have my own practice. I have five hundred architects working for me.”

  Victor and I continued to differ, sometimes wrathfully, leaving deep wounds, about which alterations in the apartment were necessary and which were not. It always went Victor’s way. Victor is a study in contrasts. He is gentle and considerate to a degree that few men are. He has unshakable faith in his judgment, however, and if he is persuaded of the correctness of his ideas, not even the Lord of the universe could budge him. He felt extremely proprietary about his bathroom, which he did not like to share. He therefore had a guest bathroom built, which had to be laboriously covered in a trio of tiny, round tiles colored chestnut-brown, fawn, and white. Victor loathes sharp edges. Wherever possible, every right angle had to be replaced by a curve. Flora Kaley’s dropped ceilings over the bedrooms and my study oppressed him. “There are five-hundred-year-old beams imprisoned up there,” he said. “There is air, there is space that wants to be let out.” And so each year, another ceiling was taken down; antique beams were scraped, repaired, waxed, or replaced entirely when necessary; the walls of another room were finished in marmorino, the famous marble-smooth Venetian finish applied with a small spatula that takes two workmen ten days to do; and another large hole was poked into our bank account. We then had hand-troweled plaster in Venice rather than drywall, and I felt I was suffocating when plaster dust fogged the air I breathed; the noise of hammering, sawing, and of power tools twists my nerves almost beyond endurance; and I was irritated to see workmen come through the door and start their work early in the morning, when I was still in my bed clothes and had not yet had my coffee.

  I was in agreement, however, on the necessity of the messiest and most ruinously expensive job we undertook, the installation of an elevator. After the Second World War, when Italy’s cities and towns were aching to modernize, draconian laws were put into place to protect historic places (too feebly enforced, unfortunately, to save the coast of Naples and of part of the Riviera). To keep Venice from being erased by the rush to build and modernize, it had been all but frozen in place. We had become good friends with Francesco Valcanover, Venice’s superintendent of fine arts, who lived on the floor above Sir Ashley Clark’s old place. Valcanover facilitated our application for a permit to install an elevator, putting in a good word with his friend and colleague, the formidable superintendent of monuments, Margherita Asso, who then had all construction and renovation in Venice under her iron thumb. In a short time—short, that is, when judged by Venice’s languid bureaucratic pace—we obtained one of the city’s rarest privileges, the permit to build an elevator. All we lacked was the required unanimous consent of the owners. One owner, a café singer who had the smallest percentage of the voting shares, refused to grant it. The elevator, he said, would alter the architectural integrity of the stairs. It took six years to bring him around and another year to build the elevator.

  During construction, the contractor had to remove part of the roof and the door to our apartment. To keep out the dust, we had heavy plastic sheets instead of a front door. It looked like the entry to an intensive care unit. Every night before they left, the workmen put up a temporary plywood door that we could lock. We couldn’t cancel a year’s classes, so we shared the noise, dust, and discomfort with our students. After six years of wrangling and one year of building, the elevator was done. It opened right into our apartment onto a small vestibule with a star-shaped marble floor in various colors that Victor had designed. For yet another year, we had to be satisfied just to look at it and admire it. There was only one elevator inspector for Venice and its surrounding territory, and it took him that long to come by. We were consoled to learn that the hospital near us also had had to wait a year for the same inspector to come to certify the elevator that went up to the operating room floor.

  I was raised in a Catholic family that was both believing and observant. My grandmother Adele had come close to taking vows, stopping just one step away from becoming a nun. Yet, when we got married, we had a civil ceremony, in the effort to spare Victor’s parents the offending news that their son had been married in church. After his parents’ death, Victor said that even though his own feelings were profoundly antireligious, if I still cared to be married in church, he would go along with it. For me, it was a dream come true.

  We lived across from one of Venice’s great churches, the Gothic Santi Giovanni e Paolo, Saints John and Paul. I had occasionally gone to mass there, where I enjoyed listening to the plainspoken and engaging sermons of Padre Pio, the Dominican parish priest. I asked him if he could marry us. “Certainly!” he said. Did it matter that my husband was Jewish and a nonbeliever? That he was Jewish did not bother him at all, but he hoped that he could help Victor acquire faith and become a good Jew.

  Because I had already been married in a civil ceremony, I needed to bring Padre P
io a copy of that certificate from my town’s city hall.

  “What is the purpose of this certificate?” asked the woman at the records office.

  “In order to get married.”

  “In that case, I must first have a copy of your divorce decree.”

  Getting married again

  “I am not divorced.”

  “If you are not divorced, you can’t get married again, and I am unable to give you a certificate.”

  “I don’t need a divorce. It’s my husband that I am marrying!”

  It was an intimate wedding, held in a beautiful small, candy box of a chapel that Padre Pio had chosen for us. It is called la cappella della Madonna della Pace, the chapel of the Madonna of Peace. The Madonna is a Byzantine icon painted sometime between the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From her place above the altar, she looked down benevolently and, it seemed to me, encouragingly on us. I had invited two of my friends from Cesenatico, and Natale and his wife, Connie. Connie came alone because Natale was in London for a meeting of Sherwood’s hotel group. The other guest was our son. Padre Pio had the organist play an air of Bach’s, married us, and concluded with a charming sermon. He said, “It’s my duty to instruct you on the steps you can take to make your marriage a sound one, but you have already been doing that for thirty years. I should also offer my counsel on how to raise the children you’ll have, but your child, who is here, is already grown, and he has grown well.” He concluded by saying that we should continue to do exactly what we had been doing. My eyes were teary the entire time.

  We went home, where Padre Pio blessed our house, and although neither Victor nor I usually drink champagne—Victor says that the only thing it has ever done for him is to give him a headache—we unbent and drained a glass of it in toasts to each other, to our guests, and to Venice. We walked over to a good local trattoria for the wedding lunch, at the conclusion of which all the guests departed. Victor told me that he had booked a gondola for later that evening to take the two of us into the small inner canals, safe from encounters with tourists. We climbed into the gondola at a landing across from our house, and I settled back in expectation of the long ride through the black, untraveled canals of Venice. I was puzzled to see the gondolier head the boat toward the most central part of town and pull up at the landing of one of the restaurants we then used to patronize. The restaurant’s owner came to greet us, and behind him came two waiters carrying a small table that they lowered into the gondola. Soon there were dishes on the table; silver; glasses; a platter with two cold boiled lobsters; small boiled potatoes; a sauceboat with homemade mayonnaise; two bowls of caviar on ice; two dessert cups filled with chocolate mousse; and an ice bucket with vodka. An accordion player boarded the gondola, seating himself at the far end from us. Then we pushed off into the dark.

  It wasn’t so dark that we weren’t noticed. But then, nothing one does in Venice goes unnoticed, although people don’t always get all the details right. Not long after, Pamela Fiori, our editor friend who, years before in our New York apartment, had taped the Danny Kaye conversation with Mrs. Horowitz, was in Venice and ran into the general manager of the Gritti Palace Hotel. “You will be amazed to learn,” he told her, “that Marcella and Victor have finally got married.”

  The decade after our church wedding was the happiest and most relaxed time we spent in Venice. I no longer had to commute to teach in Bologna, and we were not in the States very much. We had a more active social life than we had ever had before or have had since. Cities can have surprisingly different social personalities. Bologna is the capital of its region, it is industrious and prosperous, it has a famous and ancient university, yet it is as inward-looking and provincial as any small farm town. We had worked there twelve years, we had brought several thousand students and as many other visitors who followed in their wake, and directly or indirectly, we contributed significantly to the city’s economy. However, except for the people who did business with our school, who we were and what we were doing in Bologna was a subject of no interest to anyone.

  Venice, on the contrary, has been an old hand at hospitality since the Crusades. When I think back on those years, they become a blurred sequence of dinners, receptions, and jaunts to the outlying islands on someone’s boat. I think of the deliciously lazy mornings by the Cipriani pool and the incomparable seafood buffets. I remember the communal events when the lagoon and Grand Canal closed down, and everyone turned up in someone’s house or boat to watch the great fireworks show in July at Redentore, the

  Filming with Charlie Gibson on Piazza San Marco during the 1986 summit meeting in Venice

  feast of the Redeemer, celebrating the city’s deliverance from the plague, and the Regata Storica in September, to mark the city’s symbolic nuptials with the sea.

  A good friend at that time was Patricia Curtis, who lived in Palazzo Barbaro, the fifteenth-century palazzo that her Bostonian great-grandfather, Daniel Curtis, had bought in the late 1800s. Henry James, who was a friend of Daniel Curtis, stayed often at Palazzo Barbaro and used it as the template for the palazzo that figures in Wings of the Dove. To join the jovial parties that Patricia gave in the piano nobile, or the small dinners in Patricia’s upstairs apartment, when she would set up a table for four just outside the library where Henry James had worked, stimulated one’s compliant imagination into hearing distant echoes of that moment in Venice’s history when Palazzo Barbaro had been the center of its literary and artistic life.

  We also had very good times at home, where I would make dinner for one friend or forty. The one might have been Padre Pio, an unwavering devotee of my cooking, or a neighbor, Donna Leon, an English teacher at the air force base in Aviano who would become known as a writer of mysteries. It was moreover a fortunate time for eating out. There were good restaurants everywhere in Venice. It proved to be the last happy period for my legs, which were still strong and agile enough to climb the bridges and take me wherever in the city Victor chose to go, either to try a new restaurant or return to a favorite. Whenever we are in Venice again, it is a comforting reminder of a precious and vigorous period of our lives to sit at the corner table by the window at Fiaschetteria Toscana, or in one of Ivo’s banquettes, and find that we can still eat as well as we did so many years ago.

  Most of the restaurants that we admired then, however, are better not mentioned, even though they are still around. One of them has given rise to an expression that we use now whenever we have a notably unsatisfactory meal. A trio of close friends from the States, the painter Hector Leonardi, Karl Mann, and the late Ruth Birnkrant, were spending a long visit with us. On one of the evenings, when we had a commitment elsewhere, we directed them to a small restaurant where we had always eaten very well. The following day, when I asked them how it had gone, Ruth, always outspoken, said, “Terrible! Atrocious! The worst we have ever had!” I was mortified, but we had eaten there so often and so well that I had to find out for myself what could have gone wrong. A few evenings later, they agreed to let me take them all there. Our meal was flawless. “If I had been brought here blindfolded, I would have sworn on my life that this could not have been the place we came to before,” Ruth said. I called the owner, who was also the chef, over to our table. “Cesco, there is something I don’t understand. Were you not here when my friends came for dinner three nights ago?” He thought a moment, then said, “No, that was the day my wife was taken to the hospital.” “Who was doing the cooking?” “Our dishwasher.” Ever since then, when we have a particularly deplorable meal out, Victor and I look at each other and say, “It must be the dishwasher’s night at the stove.”

  My Three Graces Lucia, Maria, Nadia

  1963-1999

  AS FAR BACK as I can remember, and to the end of her very long life, my mother always had full-time domestic help. So did her sister, her sister-in-law, and all of her friends. Some among them may have been wealthy, but many were not. To enjoy the services of a woman who kept your house in order, who hand-washed everything and
pressed it, who looked after your young children or your old parents, who may or may not have cooked, but certainly did all the cleaning up after meals, wasn’t related to the money you had but to your social position. From the middle class upwards, nearly every family had servants. My parents never had any money, but the uneducated and close-to-illiterate young women who came from the farms to work in town had even less. Their cash salary was only slightly better than symbolic, but what they got they saved, and from time to time they took home some food staples, a bottle of olive oil, a piece of Parmigiano, and good used clothes.

  Italy’s semifeudal agricultural system, which populated the farms with sharecropping families that had too many mouths to feed, was a source of abundant and cheap domestic labor. It didn’t begin to change until some years after the Second World War, when profound social reforms were enacted. An Italian farm is now a business like any other, staffed with well-paid hired help. Today, Italian matrons who want to land a housekeeper must cast their net far from home, to Eastern Europe, to Africa, to the Philippines. When I returned to Italy in 1962, the new order had not yet completely supplanted the old one. Soon after we had established ourselves in Milan, and Victor had settled into what appeared to be a stable career, I looked for what I could not have afforded in New York—a woman who would live with us and help me take care of the house and my son. Not too many years later, the job description would have had to include “cooking school assistant.” I followed the still valid custom of my elders, leaving word with neighbors and friends that I was looking for a country girl to come work for me in Milan. Several came forward, but the first two or three I tried did not stay long. They were too young, and one, who had never been to a big city, became homesick; whereas another, on her free evenings, made imprudent use of the city’s diversions. Then Lucia turned up.