Documentary ‘Marcella’ Celebrates Marcella Hazan’s Joy of Cooking, Italian Style

My mother used to say that I had “bigger eyes than stomach” when as a boy I would enthusiastically ask for more of a much-loved dish, only to declare myself full after a few bites. This saying came to mind as I watched the new documentary “Marcella,” about the pioneering cook who introduced authentic Italian cooking to Americans, Marcella Hazan. As the story of her life unfolded, I had an increasing urge to go to an Italian restaurant or cook a big pasta dinner, particularly as the doc also doubles as a reverent cooking show at regular intervals. A feast for the eyes as well as the appetite, the film spotlights so many succulent ingredients and mouth-watering meals that it wouldn’t be surprising if every viewer goes out for Italian food or to a farmers’ market immediately afterward.Hazan, who died in 2013, wasn’t just a cuoca and cookbook writer but a purveyor of the Italian art of eating. As the documentary convincingly asserts, she found the perfect partner in Victor Hazan, who not only tasted everything she whipped up but was the one who compelled her to start cooking in the first place. Now in his mid-90s, Mr. Hazan is a charming presence in the film, which also features their son Giuliano, restaurateur Danny Meyer, writer Mayukh Sen, editors Susan Friedland and Dorothy Kalins, and others who speak about their love of Marcella and her recipes. One expects respected chefs such as Jacques Pepin and Lidia Bastianich to appear, and they do as commentators, yet the doc really cooks with fire when it showcases younger ones like April Bloomfield and Shola Ulunloyo making classic Marcella dishes, sometimes with visible emotion.Victor, Guiiano, and Marcella Hazan. Via Greenwich EntertainmentMarcella’s journey to becoming a world-renowned authority on Italian cuisine began in Cesenatico, a town in northern Italy on the Adriatic coast. A fall in childhood left her with a “twisted hand,” as she put it, and yet she earned dual doctorates in natural sciences and biology. Cooking was not of interest at this stage, though the film recounts some indelible food-related anecdotes, such as when her grandmother continued to fry up a meal during a World War II air raid or when, while on their honeymoon, she and Victor ate a sublime potato and leek soup. Victor’s parents were Sephardic Jews who had left Italy with their son for New York in 1939, but the young man returned after the war because he missed his home country. The two married in 1955, despite differences in religion and his parents’ disapproval. Her tenacity led her to try her hand at cooking when the couple moved to Queens. As a traditional husband, Victor expected Marcella to cook for him while he worked, even though she had never so much as boiled an egg beforehand. Eventually, feeling isolated as a non-English speaker and a housewife, she would take trips to Manhattan to find quality ingredients, summoning up memories of meals and referencing an old cookbook in order to make grand midday repasts in the traditional Italian manner. With her English a bit better by 1969, Marcella started teaching Italian cooking in the family’s new apartment on 76th Street in Manhattan (Giuliano had been born in 1958). The success of these classes and her ability to “synthesize a subject,” as her husband describes it, created the ideal circumstances to produce a cookbook, with Marcella writing recipes in Italian and Victor, who was a Harvard-educated marketer and copywriter, translating, elaborating, and editing. Several talking heads mention the elegant nature of the writing in “The Classic Italian Cook Book” — Aristotle is quoted as are other cultural figures — and attribute this to Victor. Regardless of who made it “literary,” the reviews were glowing and eventually, after they switched publishers and the book was reissued, it became a success and more followed.From the footage of Marcella on morning television shows from the ’80s, when she looked like a typical Italian nonna, one concludes that she was fun but forthright, wry though tough, and unpretentious yet serious about food. One can believe it when several commentators point out how she never measured when she cooked — or tasted, for that matter — relying on smell and what one perceives was her innate judgment and sense of proportion. This proportional perception is reflected not only in her recipes, as in her simple tomato sauce recipe that calls for the immersed half-onion to be removed at the end, but also in how she considered that balsamic vinegar, which she helped popularize, was being used too excessively in American cooking. Acclaimed documentarian Peter Miller (“Frank Lloyd Wright,” “Sacco and Vanzetti”) mixes home movie footage, video clips, archival photos, voiceover narration based on Marcella’s memoir, and more to create a rich biographical stew. His inclusion of savory asides, such as a snapshot of a bean grower in California or his short excursion to an Italian restaurant in Bhutan, confirms Marcella’s immense influence, not to mention how the culinary delights of Italy are some of the greatest in the world. This distinction, though, was always tempered by Marcella when she encouraged home cooks to keep it simple. I did just that when I made her famous Chicken with Two Lemons dish later that evening after watching the film. Both my eyes and my belly ended up satisfied that day.

Documentary ‘Marcella’ Celebrates Marcella Hazan’s Joy of Cooking, Italian Style

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