Marcella Hazan

We first met Marcella Hazan in July 1992, when she came to cook a three-day course at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Shanagarry.
She had brought her husband, Victor, a man of stunning erudition who spoke the most poetic English we had ever heard. She brought her formidable tongue – yes, she tore into one student at the class with a devastating rejoinder (full disclosure: everyone else in the class was pretty delighted when she did this as the insult was richly deserved). And she brought, above all, her exactitude. This is how you do it, she explained to us over the three days. And you don’t do it any other way.
She cooked fish cooked fish-soup style; made sublime pesto; a simple tomato sauce; casserole roasted lamb with juniper; rigatoni with sweet peppers, strawberry ice cream; risotto with vegetables, and a host of other things of surpassing deliciousness.
All the while there were snippets of information – risotto in Veneto is “a longa”: to the wave; you need four personalities to make the perfect salad dressing; use ridged pasta with a cream sauce; cook green beans in heavily salted water; in Italy the style of food and cooking changes every ten kilometres.
She was a brilliant teacher and a fascinating character. She was utterly devoid of any sense of “projection”, of needing to make her character stand out, of needing to be liked. She knew who she was, in a depthless way, an ancient way. She was the sort of person you never forgot.
Her story was particularly fascinating, as she wasn’t really a cook. Having married and moved to America, she taught herself to cook to feed her husband at the same time as teaching herself English.
She began giving classes in her apartment in Manhattan, and Craig Claiborne of The New York Times came along one day. From then, her career in food served to seal her reputation as one of the great cooks, one of the important cooks.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Marcella Hazan, however, was her husband, Victor. He wasn’t simply her translator – she didn’t write in English – he was the one who made her thoughts into delicately wrought aphorisms and poetic metaphors. Her books are fabulous works of precision and insight but, if you ever spoke at length to Mr Hazan, you quickly realised that the English voice was his. He brought elegance and wit to her thoughts, the Boswell to her Dr Johnson.
In this regard, their collaboration is one of the greatest double acts in food, and their books are classics. If you don’t have The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, you don’t really have a cookery library. And if The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking is the only cookery book you own, well lucky you.