Product Description

The food publishing event of the season: Beloved teacher and bestselling cookbook author Marcella Hazan tells how a young girl raised in Emilia- Romagna became America’s godmother of Italian cooking.

Widely credited with introducing proper Italian food to the English-speaking world, Marcella Hazan is as authentic as they come. Raised in Cesenatico, a quiet fishing town on the northern Adriatic Sea, she’d eventually have her own cooking schools in New York, Bologna, and Venice. There she would teach students from around the world to appreciate—and produce—the food that native Italians eat. She’d write bestselling and award-winning cookbooks, collect invitations to cook at top restaurants, and have thousands of loyal students and readers—some so devoted they’d name their daughters Marcella. Her fans will be as surprised and delighted by how this all came to be as Marcella herself has been.

Marcella begins with her early childhood in Alexandria, Egypt, where she broke her arm. After nearly losing the arm to poor medical treatment, she was taken back to her father’s native Italy for surgery. There the family would remain. Her teenage years coincided with World War II, and the family relocated temporarily to Lake Garda— not anticipating that it would be one of the war’s greatest targets. After years of privation and bombings, Marcella was fulfilling her ambition to become a doctor and professor of science when she met Victor, the love of her life. They married and moved to New York City. Marcella knew not a word of English or—what’s more surprising—a single recipe. She began to attempt to re-create the flavors of her homeland. She took a Chinese cooking class in the early ’60s with women who asked her to teach them Italian cooking, and she began to give them lessons. Soon after, Craig Claiborne invited himself to lunch, and the rest is history.

Amarcord means “I remember” in Marcella’s native Romagnolo dialect. In these pages Marcella, now eighty-four, looks back on the adventures of a life lived for pleasure and a love of teaching. Throughout, she entertains the reader with stories of the humorous, sometimes bizarre twists and turns that brought her love, fame, and a chance to change the way we eat forever.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260091 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 320 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. In 1969 Hazan gave the private cooking class that launched her career as the Italian Julia Child. In an evocative memoir, she recounts her life from childhood to Florida Gulf Coast retirement. Hazan spent her earliest years on another coast, in Cesenatico, a village on the Adriatic; during WWII the family moved to a lake in the mountains between Venice and Milan. Fresh out of the university, she taught college math and science and met a young man who had returned to his Italian homeland after more than a decade in America. He loved food, and his worldliness and sophistication made a good match for the comparatively earthbound author. After they married, the couple moved several times between various places in Italy and America. During a long stay in New York, Hazan began to offer the Italian cooking lessons that later caught the attention of such chefs as New York Times food writer Craig Claiborne. This led to the writing and publication in 1973 of The Classic Italian Cookbook. Hazan's memoir is a terrific history of the expansive, postwar period when Americans were still learning the difference between linguine and Lambrusco, and an engaging chronicle of professional perseverance, chance and culinary destiny. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The New Yorker
Born in Cesenatico, a fishing village near Rimini, in 1931, Hazan married the son of a New York furrier and began cooking for him. Soon, she was giving classes in her Manhattan kitchen, and when Craig Claiborne came to lunch and wrote her up in the Times Hazan was on the map. The city of Bologna built her a kitchen, and she led celebrated cooking classes in Venice. With her husband as translator, Hazan wrote �The Classic Italian Cookbook� (among others), though her publishing adventures were fraught. In this memoir, she does not have the advantage that Julia Child did, of having a voice so familiar that we hear every sentence in her inimitable delivery, but she comes through now and then: �I soon discovered a natural inclination for frying.�
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From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Nancy McKeon All the atmospherics of those Olive Garden "abbondanza" TV commercials aside, Italians can be a stern lot when it comes to food. And in the field of Italian cookery, the role of taskmaster has fallen for the past several decades to Marcella Hazan, author of six major cookbooks and widely regarded as the person who taught America how to cook Italian. Now 84, Hazan, retired and living in Florida, has produced a memoir, Amarcord (Romagnolo dialect for "I remember"), in which she recounts how a young girl trained to teach science in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy came to lead Americans out of the great miasma of red sauce. The general outline may be known among foodies, but it's charming enough to bear repeating: In the late 1960s, Hazan was taking Chinese cooking courses in her adopted city of New York when her fellow students asked her to teach them to cook Italian. She tried to get the New York Times to publicize her classes, and eventually food writer Craig Claiborne invited himself to a working lunch. "It was October 15, 1970," Hazan writes. "I have never since then had to be concerned about how to occupy my time." Hazan taught courses around the world, with students paying thousands of dollars for the opportunity to be held to her high standards. What I've left out of the above outline is perhaps the biggest factor in Hazan's life: Victor Hazan, the Italian-born, American-raised son of Manhattan furriers who whisked a young Marcella Polini Hazan off to New York in the first place. He's the one who liked to come home from the office for a traditional lunch every day, encouraging his young wife to venture into her new city and language by shopping the local markets. He applauded her foray into cooking, then into cooking classes, then became her collaborator, honing her recipes and translating them into English for her first tome, The Classic Italian Cookbook, published in 1973. The Victor Hazan revealed in this book is formidable. Victor doesn't like chicken, Marcella tells us, so she makes no chicken (left unsaid is where her chicken recipes come from). Describing the bathroom renovations to their Venice apartment, she says, "He allowed me to keep the tub, but everything else had to go." And elsewhere, "It always went Victor's way." But if Victor is stubborn, so is she. "I did not allow comings and goings during [cooking lessons], and I did not accept anyone coming late," she writes. "Anyone who refused [to clean squid] was asked to leave the class, and none ever did." She makes one half-hearted attempt to blame her moods on a longtime assistant, Maria, who "worked with a scowl and a heavy heart," surmising that "some of that glumness had started to rub off on me." The first chapters of the book are delightful. "Little is left of the world I was born into eighty-four years ago," Hazan begins, going on to describe a home where food was provided by nearby farms and summers were spent by the water in Hazan's native Cesenatico, on the Adriatic Sea. When the book moves to the more workaday world of cooking classes and book contracts, the charm begins to fade. We meet just about every boldface name the Hazans have ever encountered -- Burt Lancaster, Danny Kaye, James Beard, Julia Child -- and a verdict is rendered on each and every one. In short, the book is a kind of accounting ledger: Who loyally stood by the Hazans and who did not. Her original publisher? "As far as I could see, he could do nothing right." Chuck Williams, founder of the Williams-Sonoma chain? Still under suspicion for not confirming whether Hazan introduced his sales team to balsamic vinegar. The black list goes on: Bloomingdale's, which replaced Hazan's street-front shop with one for Michel Guérard; her former partners in an Atlanta restaurant that slipped into foreclosure; the city of Bologna, which didn't pony up a new location for a cooking school when Hazan's first lease ran out. What you wind up thinking about Amarcord, then, may depend less on how much you treasure Marcella Hazan's teaching than on how deep into the dirty dishwater you want to sink your arms.
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

Customer Reviews

Bravo Marcella
I've been a fan of Marcella's cookbooks (her Roast Chickens with Lemons is one of the best and easiest recipes I have ever cooked) and I enjoyed her autobiography. It was interesting to learn how she happened upon her illustrious cooking career. I enjoyed her funny anecdotes, especially the one about the call from her son's school in which she was told that they hoped she was making progress in learning how to cook. I found it refreshing that she also shared some of her failures and regrets. As a cook who will never have the tremendous success of writing a best-selling cookbook, it was nice to know that even best-selling cookbook authors can have failures too. I appreciated her candor about some of her professional relationships that did not work out. I did not find it to be "sour grapes." Relationships do not always work out. That's life, and apparently it happens to successful cooks and authors too.

A Fond Memoir of a Charmed (and Tasty) Life
I found Hazan's book to be one of the most entertaining "foodie" memoirs that I've read. It was a page turner that kept me interested throughout: from her fond descriptions of childhood in Italy through to the end of her teaching career in the magical city of Venice and sweet retirement on the beach in Florida.

Even though I've been a great aficionado of cooking and was aware of several media and publishing personalities, I had somehow not heard of Hazan until recent years. Thus, this memoir was perfect as an in depth introduction to this admirable woman for me. I found the tone completely sincere, frank, and heartfelt. It also made me laugh many times.

I can understand a bit of the previous reviewer's gripe, but I personally didn't find Hazan overly bitter, unhappy, or full of complaint. As I said, she's frank and forthright and speaks her mind even when it seems to verge on being indiscreet (as anyone who has met certain Italian women can attest they do very well!). Mistakes: she's made a few. Regrets: she has a few. Slights: she's felt the sting of a few. However, for me Hazan's love of life, of the many paths on which it has taken her, and above all of GOOD FOOD really shines through. I'm eager to seek out some of her cookbooks.

A Book to Savor
I have not yet finished this book...I'm savoring each page...each vibrant word, and delectable description about life and food. What a joy to read this book. I feel like I'm sitting in Marcella's kitchen as she reminisces about her life. Snuggle up with this book and a plate of manicotti, and you are sure to be in heaven. Comfort food for the mind. I had never heard of Hazan before, but will certainly purchase her cookbooks after reading her autobiography.