TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/052989/05298900.061

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 6.0 KB | 114 lines

                                                                                FOOD, Page 88

Battling Spaghetti O Taste Buds


An Italian cook pleads the case for food that "matters"

By Cathy Booth/VENICE


    A simmering sauce of endives, smoked pancetta and double
cream fills the wood-beamed Venetian kitchen with its aroma.
Bits of baby lamb are soaking up the flavor of juniper berries
and white wine. Strings of homemade tonnarelli are drying
nearby. Standing over her restaurant-size range, Marcella Hazan
looks with mock astonishment at six blushing students. "You
don't cook? What do you do? Starve?" It is her standard line
when Americans complain that they don't have time to prepare
real meals. "I despair," she says, waving a sauce-laden wooden
spoon in the air.

    But Hazan has good reason not to despair. In the past two
decades, Hazan, 65, a former biology researcher, has done more
to help refine America's Spaghetti O taste buds than any other
Italian cook. Her first effort, in 1973, The Classic Italian
Cookbook, is the definitive textbook on Italian cooking in
America. Craig Claiborne once proclaimed her a "national
treasure," and Julia Child calls her "my mentor in all things
Italian." James Beard traveled to Italy for Hazan's cooking
class. She preached the virtues of extra-virgin olive oil long
before the Mediterranean diet became a health fad, raved about
pearly risottos before they became trendy, and opened up
spaghetti-and-meatball mentalities to light, delicate radicchio
sauces. Her three cookbooks have sold 1 million copies. Her
cooking workshops in Venice have drawn students from 28
countries, including ordinary housewives, professionals and
celebrities like Danny Kaye, Burt Lancaster and Joel Grey.

    But teaching Americans how to eat Italian sometimes seems
like a Sisyphean task. "I can't ever get over how difficult it
is to develop knowledge about Italian food," she says. "You go
to a Chinese restaurant, and people are eating with chopsticks.
But give them a spoon with pasta, and they don't know how to
roll it on the fork!" That's not all. "Why is pasta overcooked
in America? Why is it oversauced? I get depressed." She regrets
having put a cold-pasta recipe in her More Classic Italian
Cookbook, which apparently sparked America's pasta-salad boom
in the '80s. "I'm so embarrassed," she rails, explaining that
cold pasta is not a part of traditional Italian cuisine. Not
that she doesn't favor many American foods: hot dogs, pastrami,
the world's best steaks, corn on the cob. Says she: "Americans
are so much more curious and open-minded about food than
Italians."

    Hazan, a native of Cesenatico who has doctorates in
geology-paleontology and biology, confesses that she learned to
cook only after marrying Italian-American Victor Hazan in 1955.
It was a struggle at first. After working as a biological
researcher at New York City's Guggenheim Foundation by day, she
would rush home each night to fix dinner. American supermarkets
shocked her: "The food was dead, wrapped in plastic coffins."
She became a professional cook by accident in 1969, when friends
in a Chinese cooking class asked for Italian recipes. (Her fame
was sealed by Claiborne, who came to lunch one day and went home
raving.)

    Hazan is hard at work on two new volumes. "They're not
cookbooks," she says. "I promised I wouldn't write another one.
These are food books." One, an Italian food encyclopedia to be
published late next year, will take readers on a culinary
voyage through Italy's regions. The second project, which she
hopes to complete by 1993, will introduce readers to Italy's
best cooks -- not restaurant chefs, but top-level home cooks
from around the country. "The idea is to tell about the
relationship between people and food," she says. "In Italy food
is something that matters. It gives joy."

    That is what she tries to convey through the exclusive
weeklong classes, costing $1,500 a student, that she teaches
several times a year in her 16th century Venetian apartment. "I
never give them a recipe to follow," she explains, sitting on
her rust-colored sofa and nibbling on a homemade Zalett cookie.
"You don't travel so far for just a recipe. My idea is to teach
cooking." She shocks some students with her constant smoking but
wins over others with her down-to-earth approach. When pupils
complain that they can't manage some maneuver, for example,
Hazan waves her right hand, deformed by a childhood accident,
and says, "If I can do it with one hand, you can do it."

    Her classes always begin with a visit to Venice's market,
where fresh produce is delivered by gondola each morning. She
pinches and pokes, expounds on zucchini and strawberries, and
describes the delights of sardines, fresh anchovies and eels.
Then it's back to Marcella's kitchen, with its Sicilian-granite
counters, ceramic vases, stainless-steel and copper pots. The
lessons are partly historical (pasta traditionally contains more
egg as you travel north to richer areas of Italy) and partly
practical (how to use a peeler: don't whittle, lightly saw from
side to side). The centerpiece is her advice on pastas and, most
important, what sauces go with which pasta. Contrary to popular
belief in America, for example, Italians do not serve meat, or
Bolognese, sauce with spaghetti. Reason: the smooth, thin
spaghetti strands cannot catch and hold the sauce.

    Unlike many nouvelle cuisine-style cooks, Hazan stresses
taste over appearance. Almost on cue, a student asks her opinion
of tomato-tinted pasta. "I've lost the war on this," says
Marcella, who argues that it makes no sense to make pasta with
tomatoes when you put a tomato sauce on top. "There's not much
appreciation for flavor in America," she complains. "Cooking is
an art, but you eat it too." Considering the number of books she
has sold in the U.S. and the flocks of American students that
converge on her kitchen each year, that message is certainly
getting through.