For Marcella Hazan, Italian food was not spaghetti and meatballs or pizza buried in cheese, but a process to introduce American to the true foods of her native land.
Hazan, the Italian food cookbook author died Sunday at the age of 89.
According to the Associated Press, the author who taught generations of Americans how to create simple, fresh Italian food, passed away in her home in Florida. The news was confirmed in an email from her son, Giuliano Hazan, and posts on Facebook and Twitter from her husband, Victor, and daughter-in-law. Hazan's health had reportedly been failing for several months.
The straight-talking cookbook author and teacher, made it her life's work to preserve and innovate recipes that reflected the best of regional cooking in Italy.
Hazan, who was born in a small Italian fishing village on the Adriatic Sea, moved to New York City in the late 1950s and was best known for her six cookbooks, which were written in Italian and translated into English, by her husband of 57 years.
"The unbalanced use of garlic is the single greatest cause of failure in would-be Italian cooking," she wrote in her 2004 cookbook "Marcella Says". "It must remain a shadowy background presence. It cannot take over the show."
Hazan, born Marcella in 1924, did not intend to be a professional cooking teacher or author. She graduated from the University of Ferrara with a doctorate in natural sciences and biology.
She married Victor, who was born in Italy but raised in New York, in 1955 and moved to the U.S. After realizing she needed to feed her husband, who longed for Italian food, Hazan took a Chinese cooking class, which was later cancelled. Students in the class decided they wanted Hazan to teach them to how to cook Italian food.
Hazan began offering classes in her New York City apartment. She and Victor opened a cooking school in Bologna and Venice. Hazan gave birth to her son Giuliano in 1958. He also shares his parents passion for food.
The world of cooking has lost a giant today. My mother-in-law Marcella Hazan melted away peacefully, my father in law at her side.
— Lael Hazan (@educatedpalate) September 29, 2013
Hazan's "The Classic Italian Cook Book," published in 1973, and "More Classic Italian Cooking" (1978) were updated and combined into "Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking" in 1992.
Julia Child once called Hazan, "my mentor in all things Italian." It was Hazan's 1973 cookbook, "The Classic Italian Cookbook," that led gourmands to draw comparisons between Hazan and Child. The two women became longtime friends.
Child told People Magazine in 1998 that Hazan was "forbidding because she's rough, that's her manner, and she's got a good heart."
New York Times, Craig Claiborne, who discovered Hazan, called her a "national treasure." In 2000 Hazan was given the James Beard Foundation's lifetime achievement award, one of cooking's highest honors.
In her classes and cookbooks, she urged home cooks to be more daring. She instructed them on the difference between any old olive oil and truly fine olive oil, and taught the fine points of when and when not to use such things as an expensive balsamic vinegar.
"What you keep out is as significant as what you put in," she wrote in her 1997 cookbook "Marcella Cucina".
Hazan once wrote she felt a passion not just for good food but for the hands-on process of preparing it. She once said that "80% of Italian cooking is done in a saute pan." Even cooking in an oven put her "at a distance."
"I need to smell its smells, to hear its sounds, to see food in a pot that simmers, bubbles, sizzles," she wrote in "Marcella Cucina". "I enjoy the physical involvement of stirring, turning, poking, mashing, scraping."
On Sunday, Victor wrote on Facebook:
"Marcella, my incomparable companion, died this morning a few steps away from her bed. She was the truest and best, and so was her food."
In recent years, Hazan lived with her husband in Florida, near their son, Giuliano, a chef and also a cookbook author. Both survive her, along with two grandchildren.
