Amarcord
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The food publishing event of the season: Beloved teacher and bestselling cookbook author Marcella Hazan tells how a young girl raised in Emilia- Romagna became America's godmother of Italian cooking.Widely credited with introducing proper Italian food to the English-speaking world, Marcella Hazan is as authentic as they come. Raised in Cesenatico, a quiet fishing town on the northern Adriatic Sea, she'd eventually have her own cooking schools in New York, Bologna, and Venice. There she would teach students from around the world to appreciate—and produce—the food that native Italians eat. She'd write bestselling and award-winning cookbooks, collect invitations to cook at top restaurants, and have thousands of loyal students and readers—some so devoted they'd name their daughters Marcella. Her fans will be as surprised and delighted by how this all came to be as Marcella herself has been.Marcella begins with her early childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, where she broke her arm. After nearly losing the arm to poor medical treatment, she was taken back to her father's native Italy for surgery. There the family would remain. Her teenage years coincided with World War II, and the family relocated temporarily to Lake Garda— not anticipating that it would be one of the war's greatest targets. After years of privation and bombings, Marcella was fulfilling her ambition to become a doctor and professor of science when she met Victor, the love of her life. They married and moved to New York City. Marcella knew not a word of English or—what's more surprising—a single recipe. She began to attempt to re-create the flavors of her homeland. She took a Chinese cooking class in the early '60s with women who asked her to teach them Italian cooking, and she began to give them lessons. Soon after, Craig Claiborne invited himself to lunch, and the rest is history.Amarcord means “I remember” in Marcella's native Romagnolo 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 chance to change the way we eat forever. The Barnes & Noble Review We all start somewhere. Marcella Hazan s first dish was a pulp of mulberry leaves boiled with polenta to feed a piglet during wartime (the better to eat the beast later). But cooking would come to her, like words come to a child, without formal training, by osmosis from her family and from the peckish urgings of her husband. Her cookbooks on classic Italian food would become, rightly, as revered as Ferraris and Sophia Loren. That, however, is down the road in Amarcord, so first things first. We learn in the early, cradle-song pages of this memoir that Hazan was born on Italy s northern Adriatic coast, in a port town of convivial pandemonium. Lovingly, immaculately drawn, it was a "sweet, simple village," and Hazan s life was a sweet, little chestnut (despite a broken arm that turned gangrenous, with crippling results), carefree and not a moment toiling in the kitchen. Then came war. Food, by default, became a preoccupation. Hazan paid attention at the stove as her elders worked their wizardry with scant means. She learned to appreciate salt, beans, and a dark humor. With peacetime, Victor came into her life: a bohemian with a growling stomach and a knack, as her collaborator, for turning her Italian into splendid English. It is a pleasure to read a memoir in which life is a blessing (lots of fighting, too, but an elemental affection) complete with fractious in-laws, a bundle of joy --"It was he now, instead of Victor, who interrupted my sleep" -- the circumstantial birth of her cooking classes, and, oh boy, the food. As a teacher, she is a tough-as-nails taskmaster; as an associate, she is disarmingly frank: here, both Alan Davidson and Judith Jones get a sleeve across the windpipe. If the latter part of the book trails a bit -- a few too many celebrity shoulders rubbed at meals to die for -- think of it as her just desserts. --Peter Lewis
Alexandria and Cesenatico, 1931-1937 1Cesenatico, La Comitivu, 1940 9The War, 1940-1945 19Home Again, 1945 39Out of the University, into Love and Marriage, 1949-1955 47On to the New World, 1955-1962 67Back to the Old World, 1962-1967 91Back to the New World, 1967-1970 115A Book Born Twice and Twice Reborn, 1971-1980 135A Funny Thing Happened, 1973-1975 147Bologna, 1975-1987 161Other Worlds, 1984-1992 189How Not to Get Rich, 1972-1993 209Venice, 1978-1995 223My Three Graces, 1963-1999 261Parting with Knopf, 1975-1993 271Leaving Venice, 1993-1999 281Index 297
