Marcella Hazan’s book ‘Marcella’s Italian Kitchen’. © CooksInfo / 2021
The 15th of April is the birthday of Marcella Hazan, who was born on this day in 1924 in Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
In the United States, she became for Italian food what Julie Child was for French food.
Her goal was to educate Americans in authentic Italian food — as compared to the Italian-style food that some restaurants were passing off as Italian.
She could be impatient and testy with innovations in cooking that she didn’t approve of. She disliked garlic presses, and didn’t approve of the American innovation of serving a lemon twist with espresso. But she was good at laying out principles that should be followed, and generally tried to keep her recipes simple in terms of ingredients — though they could still be a lot of work because she was a stickler when it came to technique.
She had many quirks, one of which was that she did not drink wine, preferring Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
Read about her life: Marcella Hazan Biography, Italian Food.
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