Amarcord

by Marcella Hazan

  Lucia came from a hamlet high on one of the tall hills west of Cesenatico. She was astride of her late thirties and early forties, and unmarried, with no changes to her status in sight. She had the taut body and the sun- and wind-darkened skin of mountain people. Her smile was shy, and her eyes kind but sad. Sometimes, they looked spooked. She neither smoked nor drank. I remember how gently she broke the news to me, when we were living in Milan, and we had come back late from an evening out, that Papi had died. She was proud yet deferential. She immediately formed a deep attachment for Giuliano, then just six years old, an affection that lasted well beyond the years of her employment. Lucia was not a terrific cook, but like other women in Romagna of her age, she could roll out a fine sheet of pasta by hand.

  We were fond of Lucia, but she was extremely reticent, reluctant to yield any clues to her feelings or thoughts. There was a cloud of mystery around her that never completely cleared away. On Lucia’s day off, whether we were living in Milan, in Rome, or later in New York, and during the nonworking stops of a book or teaching tour in America, she disappeared and returned home late in the evening without a word about where she had been or what she had seen. It was particularly puzzling in the States because she neither spoke nor understood English. I think with amusement of the time in New York when I sent her to D’Agostino to buy a chicken. Victor, who does not eat fowl and is uncomfortable even to see it on the table, was out of town, and I greatly anticipated the uninhibited pleasure of a chicken fricassee done my way, the meat falling off the bones, its unctuous juices running down my fingers. I told Lucia to buy a small bird because there would be only the two of us eating. She came back with a portly roaster that might have fed four. “Lucia,” I said, “questo è un pollo per quattro, this is a chicken for four!” “No, signora, guardi qui, not so madam, look here, è un pollo per due, it’s a chicken for two.” And she pointed to the label that said “Perdue,” for two, if read as Italian.

  Our disagreements always arose when she misunderstood my instructions. The final one was about artichokes. I was going to show a class how to trim artichokes the Italian way. I have never had a student who knew how to do it. Italians cut away most of the artichoke, keeping only those parts that are tender. When you cook it, all of it is edible. I found that others leave everything on when they cook an artichoke, which obliges you, when eating it, to scrape the tender bits off the leaves with your teeth. I needed seven artichokes, one for each of the six students to work on, and one for me to demonstrate the technique. It was a procedure with which Lucia was well acquainted. On that morning, I found that, inexplicably, she had failed to get artichokes when she had marketed for the class. The students had already arrived when I asked Lucia to rush back to the market for the artichokes. She returned after an awkwardly long time with only six artichokes. It was late, I was upset, but she became even more upset and closeted herself in her room, never to come out again for the duration of the class. My mother, who had come to stay with me at that time, went out herself to buy the seventh artichoke. I did not intend to fire Lucia, but I spoke sharply to her and she construed my remarks as a dismissal. It was late spring, close to the beginning of the summer break in my courses. At the end of the last course, Lucia packed all her things and returned to Italy. She had been with me for twelve years.

  I wrote to nearly every one of my friends and acquaintances throughout Italy, asking if they knew of a mature woman who would be willing to come to New York to work for me. I specified that she had to be able to roll out pasta by hand. Soon I had a reply from my former landlady in Ferrara, with whom I had lodged when I was going to the university. She knew of someone from a village on the Veneto mainland near Venice who said she would come. She was single, in her forties, and a dependable, strong, hard worker. Her manner was gruff, I was warned, but she was good-hearted and loyal. Her name was Maria. I was spending most of my summer in a small town on the coast of the Italian Riviera, where I hoped to learn more about Ligurian cooking. One of the most popular recipes I ever published, the chicken with two lemons, came out of that trip. I immediately wrote to Ferrara: “I want to meet Maria as soon as possible. Have her come to see me in Liguria.”

  She was a short, stout woman in tight-fitting clothes. I would learn that she didn’t think of herself as fat, and wore the tightest clothes she could get into to prove it. She was not exhibiting her gruffness that day, but I would get large doses of it ever after. She was in fact very pleasant, with a ready smile. It was one of the few smiles I was to see on her face in the twenty-one years that Maria lived with us. I asked her why she was willing to leave Italy. “I want to make a change in my life,” she said. Her mother had died when she was still a very young girl, and she had worked hard ever since. She had had to take charge of the household, to bring up her younger brothers and sister, and when she was older, she moved from one tough job to another. I explained what I was doing and what her duties would be. She was incredulous and thought it rather funny that a doctor, actor, or businessman would take cooking instruction, but she was sure that whatever the work required she could handle it. “Can you roll out pasta by hand?” I asked. “Faccio di tutto in cucina” (“I can do everything in the kitchen”), she replied. I offered her a glass of wine, which she accepted and drained, and she lit a cigarette. “That’s a change from Lucia,” I thought.

  When we moved back from Italy in 1967, we had taken a two-bedroom apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street. When Lucia came over, she had to share a bedroom with Giuliano. As soon as we were able, we moved to a larger apartment, where she had a bedroom of her own. The kitchen was larger too, and it was bright with a tall window facing south on East Seventy-sixth Street. There was even room in it for a four-foot-long butcher-block table that was perfect for rolling out pasta. I gave Maria my long Bolognese rolling pin, eggs, and flour, and asked her to show me how she made pasta.

  “I have never made pasta,” she said.

  “Why did you tell me you did?”

  “I didn’t think it was important. Why do we have to make pasta? Don’t you have stores where you can buy it?”

  I was vexed by the deception, but it was not surprising that she had never made pasta. The boundaries sealing off one regional cooking tradition from another in Italy have long since suffered many breaches, but in Maria’s youth the people of her native Veneto region did not eat pasta; they ate rice. “You may think this cooking course is a joke, but it’s no joke,” I said to her. “It’s a serious business and we have serious customers who expect to learn, among other things, how to make pasta. I don’t intend to make a brutta figura, to look bad, on your account. I am going to teach you how to roll out fresh pasta dough with a rolling pin, and no matter how many eggs it takes and how much flour, you are going to learn before the next course starts.” Maria set her features into that joyless mask that I came to accept as her face, but she learned how to roll out pasta dough. And she learned it well.

  I found that no expression of pleasure, of curiosity, of approbation, of enthusiasm, of mirth was likely to escape Maria. She would turn over one’s most commonplace observation in order to expose its dark side. If in looking out the window one morning, I would say, “What a pretty day it’s going to be,” she would respond, “It will rain in the afternoon.” In her movements, there was the brusqueness of unappeasable anger. She would not put something down if it could be slammed down instead. In her first month in New York, she chipped every single piece of Victor’s favorite dinner service. In our school in Bologna, we had as much breakage of glass as a small restaurant’s. She passed through people in a room with the undeviating trajectory of a bowling ball headed for a strike. In Venice, we had to forbid her to leave her room in the morning before we were up. Despite their monumental exteriors, the interiors of the palazzi of Venice are built of the lightest possible materials so they won’t weigh too heavily on the pilings that support them. When Maria stomped down the corridor alongside our bedroom, the rumble and vibrations of the flimsy floo
rboards could just as easily have been produced by jackbooted soldiers on patrol. To describe Maria, I used to say she was a cross between Mussolini and a bulldozer.

  After spending one summer’s end on Long Island, we returned to Venice to prepare for the first course of the fall semester. As always, when we were away, Maria looked after the house and polished it to a high luster for our return. We went to bed early that night, having lost the previous night’s sleep on the transatlantic crossing. I had been asleep for about two hours when I heard a tremendous slamming of drawers and the trembling of the house from stomping feet. Reluctantly, I pushed the bedclothes aside and rose. I went where the noises were coming from, at the end of the hall, in Maria’s room. I found her fully dressed. She clutched her chest. “I am having an attack,” she said. “I am going to the hospital.” “Calma, calma, hold on,” I said. “I’ll call the litter carriers.” The hospital was on the other side of our canal, and an ambulance boat was unnecessary. Emergency transport to the hospital, in such cases, required a hand-carried sedan chair. I gave our house number when I called, but because house numbers don’t follow an easily comprehended pattern in Venice, I got dressed and went down outside the house to hail the chair carriers as soon as they appeared on the street. I had told Maria to sit down upstairs and wait, but she had taken the elevator after me and came down to our courtyard with her good Sunday coat on. She paced furiously back and forth. When the men carrying the chair entered our courtyard, they looked from me to Maria asking, “Who is the patient?”

  Maria did have a minor heart attack, which she overcame handily. She never returned to work. Years before, she had bought and furnished a modern apartment in her old town, where she retired. There she still lives.

  There was a classful of students coming in two weeks, and I had no one to help me. I called Mara Martìn, who, with her husband, Maurizio, owned the celebrated restaurant Da Fiore. Mara and Maurizio came from a farm town outside Venice, and I thought that they would be the most likely people to know someone interested in the job. Mara phoned the next day. “We are in luck,” she said. “I have the perfect girl for you. She is from our town and I have known her all my life. Can I bring her to meet you in the morning?” Nadia had never worked in anyone’s house before. In her middle thirties, she had worked for the previous fifteen years as a bookkeeper. The company where she had most recently been working had gone bankrupt. She was tall, slim, and comely, with long black hair and a ready smile. She was skeptical at first about accepting the decline in status that doing housework for others implied, but she liked to cook and was bright and adventurous enough to be intrigued by the descriptions of my cooking classes and of the people who came from all over the world to attend them. She could not live in with us, however. She had a husband and a young son and had to be back home before evening. We were not unhappy about that. The conveniences of having a live-in housekeeper are paid for with a loss of privacy. I offered her the job and she accepted.

  For Maria, cooking had been another of life’s toilsome tasks that she had been sentenced to perform. She was indubitably a hard and productive worker, but lacking any enthusiasm for what we did, or for anything else for that matter, she worked with a scowl and a heavy heart. When Nadia joined me in the kitchen, I felt an immense weight slipping away from me. For the first time, the person I shared my work with was someone who enjoyed it. At last, there was space and time for levity in the kitchen. When I heard Nadia’s happy laugh, I felt that I was being compensated by Providence for the two humorless decades I had passed with her predecessor. I wish that Providence had gotten around to it earlier, before some of that glumness had started to rub off on me.

  Maria about to break eggs for the pasta lesson

  Parting with Knopf

  1975-1993

  IT WAS A FORTUNATE day for my career when Julia Child brought Judith Jones and me together. It’s what I thought then and what I think now. I was immensely taken with Judith. She was both different and familiar. She was different from all the publishing and newspaper people I had met until then. Her voice was husky and her diction, to my Italian ears, had what I took to be the inflections of cultivated American speech. Her light-colored eyes had an amused and comforting twinkle; they sparkled with intelligence and, it seemed, lively empathy. It was the way in which she dressed and put herself together that was familiar to me. Judith reminded me of the style of certain well-bred, conservative Italian women. I never saw her wearing pants or a dress but always skirts of modest length, a blouse, and a sweater. She wore very little makeup. Her hair then, which I remember as an ash blond, fell with girlish softness to her shoulders. We were born a month apart in the same year.

  If I was at first intimidated by seeing in her office the books and photographs of the eminent authors she was editing, she soon put me at ease. When an author hands her book to a publisher, it’s as though she were handing over her infant. A book can be so defenseless. When Judith took the Harper’s Magazine Press edition of The Classic Italian Cook Book in hand, I felt as a mother might when she thinks she has found a doctor who can make her ailing child well and strong. And Judith did.

  At the beginning, Victor and I had a cordial relationship with Judith and her simpatico husband, Evan, in which we thought we saw the makings of friendship. We shared several meals, at my place and hers, and exchanged little gifts. She once gave me a delicious terrine she had made, molded into a small terra-cotta-glazed lidded dish. We still have the dish and use it every morning. Victor likes a dollop of whipped heavy cream with his espresso. He whips up a week’s supply and stows it in Judith’ s dish. It’s good for a week in the refrigerator.

  I can’t say exactly when the warm feelings that we had once enjoyed began to cool. It was a perplexing turn of events that pains me to this day. It may have started with a dinner party I gave at home for a story People magazine wanted to do. The magazine had asked if I could organize a small dinner for Julia and Paul Child and James Beard, and round it out with two or three other friends or prominent students. I invited a television producer from PBS, whom I never saw again and whose name I have forgotten, and two students, the singer and actor Joel Grey and Ronald Lauder, who came with their wives. I suggested that we include Judith and Evan. The magazine said no, it might make the dinner too much of a publisher’s party, and for their story, they preferred a more varied mix. Judith felt she should have been included and took offense.

  Judith had no input on the content of The Classic Italian Cook Book, which Knopf reissued leaving the text and illustrations unchanged. More Classic Italian Cooking, my second cookbook, was the first book

  Julia, Paul, and Jim Beard at the dinner for People magazine

  that Judith edited. Inexplicably to me, it didn’t go smoothly. I felt I was matched against an antagonist rather than paired with an editor. She complained that when she sautéed onion following my recipes, the onions in the pan were burned because I hadn’t said anything about stirring. I can remember her taking strong exception to a recipe for gratinéed cauliflower with béchamel. “It’s just old cauliflower with white sauce, so trite,” she said dismissively. “There is nothing Italian about it.” I could not allow even Judith to tell me what was or was not Italian. “You call it white sauce; we call it balsamella,” I said, “and we have been using it forever. Without balsamella, there wouldn’t be any lasagne alla bolognese, and there is nothing un-Italian about lasagne. Moreover, I have never had cauliflower in this country that tastes in the least like mine. Make it and see.” Judith claimed that she often tested recipes with her authors in their kitchens. She never came into mine. Nor did she ever attend any of my courses.

  We had puzzling, inconclusive discussions about my bread recipes. I am admittedly not a baker. When I entered the kitchen, I left

  Judith Jones and Wolfgang Puck present me with the Who’s Who in Cooking award

  chemistry behind in the laboratory. In addition, Judith made it clear that bread was a subject she knew a great deal about
. She had an issue with a recipe for mantovane, a roll popular in northern Italy, but to this day, I don’t know what her problem was. With all her bread expertise, she never made a single specific suggestion. I made the rolls several times and they looked and tasted the way they were supposed to. She made them and they neither looked nor tasted good. James Beard was celebrated for his work on bread, and on an evening that we were to have dinner together at the Four Seasons restaurant, I made a few of my rolls for him to try, following my own recipe. When I put them on the table, the Italian maître d’, Oreste, recognized them immediately. “Ah, le mantovane!” he exclaimed. For reasons too deep perhaps for me to plumb, this episode did not sit well with Judith.

  The antagonisms from More Classic Italian Cooking carried over to Marcella’s Italian Kitchen, my third cookbook. I remember a telephone conversation in which Judith had been so unpleasant that when I put the phone down I thought it would become impossible for me to go on with the book. Yet it became, like a child born in a time of crisis, the cookbook closest to my heart. I use it all the time. There was no fondness for it on Knopf’s part, however. The first printing was so niggardly that stores were instantly out of it. The small printing adversely affected the publisher’s cost-to-profit ratio, and we had to take a cut in royalties. The initial demand for that book exceeded Knopf’s ability to print and ship it in time, and they had to fill orders with copies borrowed from the Book-of-the-Month Club. Marcella’s Italian Kitchen is still in print, but in a softcover edition. It never fully recovered from its stunted launch.

  Two or three years after its publication, Victor and I were lunching with Bob Lescher, our excellent agent, who put on the table a sheet of paper with some figures. “Look at these sales figures for The Classic Italian Cook Book and More Classic Italian Cooking,” Bob said. They had started declining, and the decline in the most recent years was steep. “Perhaps you should think about revising both books and reissuing them to boost sales.”