TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/052989/05298900.061

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 6KB | 102 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.