#marcella hazan

[odettecarotte]

Louise Glück, NYT

Louise Glück, photo by Charles S. Hertz

b. 1943

The Nobel-winning poet was pitiless to herself, yet fiercely generous toward her students.

By Amy X. Wang The New York Times

She stood barely five feet tall — slight, unassuming, you had to stoop low to kiss her cheek — but whenever Louise Glück stepped into a classroom, she shot a current through it. Students stiffened their spines, though what they feared was not wrath but her searing rigor: Even in her late 70s, after she won the Pulitzer and the National Humanities Medal and the Nobel, she always spoke to young writers with complete seriousness, as if they were her equals. “My first poem, she ripped apart,” says Sun Paik, who took Glück’s poetry class as a Stanford undergraduate. “She’s the first person whom I ever received such a brutal critique from.” Mark Doty, a National Book Award-winning poet who studied under Glück in the 1970s at Goddard College, felt that she “represented total authenticity and complete honesty.” This, he recalls, “pretty much scared me half to death.”

Spare, merciless, laser-precise: Glück’s signature style as a writer. It was there from an early age. Born in 1943 to a New York family of tactile pragmatists (her father helped invent the X-Acto knife), Glück, a preternaturally self-competitive child, was constantly trying to whittle away at her own perceived shortcomings. When she was a teenager, she developed anorexia — that pulverizing, paradoxical battle with both helplessness and self-control — and dropped to 75 pounds at 16. The disorder prevented her from completing a college degree. Many of the poems Glück wrote in her early 20s flog her own obsessions with, and failures in, control and exactitude. Her narrators are habitués of a kind of limitless wanting; her language, a study in ruthless austerity. (A piano-wire-taut line tucked in her 1968 debut, “Firstborn”: “Today my meatman turns his trained knife/On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life.”) In her late 20s, Glück grew frustrated with writing and was prepared to renounce it entirely.

So she took, in 1971, a teaching job at Goddard College. To her astonishment, being a teacher unwrapped the world — it bloomed anew with possibility. “The minute I started teaching — the minute I had obligations in the world — I started to write again,” Glück would confess in a 2014 interview. Working with young minds quickly became a sort of nourishment. “She was profoundly interested in people,” says Anita Sokolsky, a friend and colleague from Williams College, where Glück began teaching in 1984. “She had a vivid and unstinting interest in others’ lives that teaching helped focus for her. Teaching was very generative to her writing, but it was also a kind of counter to the intensity and isolation of her writing.”

Glück’s own poems became funnier and more colloquial, marrying the control she earlier perfected with a new, unexpected levity (in her 1996 poem “Parable of the Hostages”: “What if war/is just a male version of dressing up”), and it is her later books, like the lauded “The Wild Iris” from 1992, that made her a landmark literary figure. Teaching also coaxed out a new facet in Glück herself: that of a devoutly unselfish mentor, a tutor of unbridled kindness.

A less fastidious writer and thinker may have made their teaching duties rote — proffering uniformly encouraging feedback or reheating a syllabus year after year. Glück, though, threw herself into guiding pupils with the same care and intimacy she gave to her own verses. “There was just this voraciousness, this generosity,” says Sally Ball, who met Glück while studying with her at Williams and remained close with her for the three decades until her death. “Every time I moved, she put me in touch with people in that new place. She enjoyed bringing people to know each other and sharing the things she loved.” And as a teacher, Ball says, “Louise was really clear that you have to make yourself change. You can’t just keep doing the same things over and over again.” In that spirit of boundless self-advancement, Glück also taught herself to love cooking and eating. She once hand-annotated a Marcella Hazan recipe and mailed it to Ball, with sprawling commentary on how best to prepare rosemary. “She’s very beautiful and elegant, right,” Ball says, but “we’d go to Chez Panisse and sit down and she eats with gusto. It’s messy, she’s mopping her hands around on the plate.”

Paik recalls spending hours each week decoding Glück’s dense, cursive comments on her work. “I was 19 or 20,” she says, “writing these scrappy, honestly pretty bad poems, and to have them be received with such care and detail — it pushed me to become a better writer because it set a standard of respect.”

“She was 78, and whenever she talked about poetry, it felt like the first time she’d encountered poetry,” says Shangyang Fang, who met Glück when he was at Stanford on a writing fellowship. Glück offered to edit his first poetry collection, and the pair became close friends. “She would talk about a single word in my poem for 10 minutes with me,” Fang says. Evenings would go late. They cooked for each other sometimes, spending hours talking vegetables and spices, poetry and idle gossip. “By the end, I couldn’t thank her enough, and she said: ‘Stop thanking me! I am a predator, feeding on your brain!’”

[imthefailedartist]

Spaghetti Night

I made my own sauce!!!

1 can peeled whole tomatoes (smush 'em), half stick butter, onion half, basil sprig, salt. Simmer 45 min.-1 hr.

Meat

1 lb. Beef, half onion diced, green bell pepper (small) diced, salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder.

Top with parm.

I might never go back to jarred pasta sauce. I always thought people were lying when they said it was easy to make, but they weren't lying. Toss all the ingredients in the pot to simmer and call it a day.

I'm so proud of myself.

Next, I'll have to make pasta from scratch. I've been obsessing over carbonara, so I might have to try it.

[themanhattanfoodproject]

One of my birthday gifts this year was Marcella Hazan’s Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, and I don’t know why I didn’t try to get this book earlier because it’s as marvelous as everyone says. Her sausage and pepper sauce--paired here with lasagnette--is incredibly simple but still packed with flavor. I’m looking forward to diving into this book a little more in the coming months, that’s for sure. 

[cynthiabertelsen]

In a Kitchen Far, Far Away ...

Once upon a time, in a kitchen far, far away … A neophyte Italian cook opened up Marcella Hazan’s The Classic Italian Cook Book: The Art of Italian Cooking and the Italian Art of Eating and two handsome princes swore eternal love over an ethereal pasta roll stuffed with spinach and ricotta.* That’s how the story would begin, and end, in a fairy tale. [More about fairy tales and their real…

[a-wa-c]

C O O K I N G T I M E

Birthday present from family. 705 pages of recipes to work out

[chefilona]

CHEF ILONA: TEMPURA CHICKEN PARMESAN SLIDERS

Chicken tempura is a Japanese dish that involves coating chicken pieces in a light, crispy batter and then deep-frying them until they are golden brown and cooked through. Tempura batter typically consists of flour, water, and sometimes eggs or other seasonings. The batter is mixed to a thin consistency and the chicken pieces are dipped in it before being fried in hot oil. The result is chicken with a crunchy exterior and tender interior.

Chicken tempura is often served with dipping sauces such as soy sauce or tempura dipping sauce, but today, my plan is to bring together the superior Japanese batter, with Italian flavours for a laid back romantic meal- Tempura Chicken Parmesan Sliders.

TEMPURA CHICKEN PARMESAN

CHEF ILONA DANIEL

SERVES 2-4

1 lb chicken breast, sliced into thin strips seasoned with salt and pepper

Batter:

3/4 cup all purpose flour

1/4 cup cornstarch

1/4 teaspoon baking soda 

1 large egg, whisked

1 cup soda water 

In a bowl, mix together the dry ingredients. Make a well in the center and stir in egg and soda water.

Heat oil in small to medium pot to 340-350F

Keep the batter sitting in a bowl resting in a bowl filled with ice.

Dip the strips of chicken in to the batter and allow excess batter to drip off.

Fry the chicken in batches fro 3-5 minutes or until golden brown and chicken is cooked through.

I like to arrange the chicken on a board with garlic butter toasted slider buns, fresh mozzerella, a batch of Marcella Hazan's tomato sauce, and crunchy vegetables as a BYO chicken parm slider situation.

[lazylittledragon]

i've spent the past few weeks learning to make pasta from scratch and i think everybody should do it actually!!

[mycenaae]

orecchiette with sausage & rapini in my homemade tomato sauce :)

[dilleater]

saw my gf last night and we made pearl barley risotto style with shell beans, sausage, dandelion greens + arugula and a salad also with dandelion greens, arugula, shiso leaves, kohlrabi, + pod beans with a blueberry vinagrette

[recents]

im here to post lunch. look at my fucking reheated leftovers i had made last night. that’s right. chicken thighs baby

[pouringforever]

Mafaldine with Marcella Hazan's iconic tomato sauce recipe, with parmezan and good olive oil on top.

Basking in the tiny glimpse of sunlight we were afforded today.

[mariacallous]

The renowned Italian cookbook author, Marcella Hazan, considered by many as the godmother of modern Italian cuisine, left an indelible mark on the culinary world with her meticulous and traditional approach to Italian cuisine. While her recipes live on in the kitchens of home cooks worldwide, her wild journey to becoming one of America’s most famous chefs remains a mystery to most. Her journey to success saw Hazan go from fleeing Nazi officers, to marrying an Italian Jewish businessman and discovering the recipes and secrets of Italian Jewish cuisine that would ultimately shape her destiny. 

An Uphill Battle

Hazan was born to a Catholic family in Cesenatico, Italy. As a young child she was disabled by an injury, leaving her with just one good hand, so she rarely ventured too far into the kitchen. While Hazan grew up around delicious food, for much of her early life, her experience in the kitchen was relegated to boiling water for pasta and making mulberry porridge for the family’s livestock. 

Marcella instead was a woman of science, studying biology voraciously in all her free time. But when the Nazis had invaded Italy in the final years of the war, Marcella’s luck took a turn for the worse. She was taken to court over suspicion of murdering a Nazi officer. 

Suspicions arose during her time in high school, after her professor of human anatomy had lent Hazan a human skeleton, all but the head. Hoping to learn even more about the human body she did what any strong-willed aspiring student would do; she went to the cemetery to dig up a skull with the help of the local gravedigger. But when letters to a friend were intercepted, officials understood her keeping the skull as her keeping a souvenir of the man she had murdered. 

Marcella prepared her remarks for weeks, knowing that her life depended on her ability to convince them of her innocence. She was brought before a local judge and was interrogated for hours, in which time Hazan explained the predicament. After the gravedigger vouched for her, the judge told Marcella: “We are too busy here with serious matters to spend time on such foolishness. Take your skull, go home, and don’t let us see you again.”

Married Life

Following that startling incident, Marcella worked to become a biology teacher at a local middle school. She continued to spend more of her time in the laboratory than the kitchen. However, when she married Italian-American Jew Victor Hazan, he introduced her to an entirely new world of cooking. Victor and his family had escaped Italy and the fascist rule for the greener pastures of New York, but he had returned to Italy to reconnect with his roots. He loved to cook, always trying new dishes out in the kitchen, while Marcella still only knew how to boil water and make porridge. 

New York, New York

This completely changed in 1955, when they married and moved to the hustle and bustle of New York City. In Italy, she explained in a 2010 NPR interview, “The chicken, they were arriving from the farmer and they were alive. And at the supermarket they were very dead; they were wrapped; it was like a coffin. Everything was not natural.”

She decided the only way she could survive in a country like this was to learn to cook. Luckily she had some help from Victor’s Jewish mother, Giulia. Every Friday night they would go for Shabbat dinner at their apartment. 

Giulia was famous for her borekitas, a classic Sephardic Shabbat treat. “One was made with phyllo dough, and the other one was kind of a crumbly dough,” Giuliano Hazan, Victor and Marcella’s only son, shared in an interview with the St. Louis Jewish Light. “She would fill them with spinach or a mix of cheeses, and she would do eggplant fillings, which were really good.”

Nonna Giulia was also known for her green beans stewed with tomatoes, her spinach and chickpeas with lemon juice and her browned okra with tomatoes. Marcella learned from these dishes and incorporated the concepts into her own food, and began to develop a deep passion for creating simple but nourishing meals. 

After discovering her love for cooking, Marcella wanted to discover other cuisines. So she signed up for a Chinese cooking class, but after the teacher got sick following just one class her classmates decided they preferred to learn Italian cooking with Ms. Hazan instead. Her husband, sensing an opportunity, encouraged it. “You like to teach, you like to cook,” he said. “Put the two things together and stop complaining.”

Word began to spread throughout the New York culinary scene about these small cooking classes that emphasized the authentic, uncompromising methods of Italian cuisine and fresh ingredients and flavors. 

Marcella’s work in introducing Italian cuisine to the American public was facilitated by her partnership with Victor, who translated her books from Italian to English and supported her culinary endeavors. In 1973, she published “The Classic Italian Cookbook,” now lauded as a monumental book in modern American cuisine. Her recipes for dishes like Roast Chicken with Two Lemons and her signature bolognese sauce have superseded her reputation and have been handed down from generation to generation. In the end, it was Marcella’s perseverance, integrity and authenticity that endeared her cooking to millions. Her unwillingness to let anything stop her in her way is a testament to her uncompromising attitude and the lessons she learned cooking with her husband’s Jewish family.  

Building on his mother’s legacy, Giuliano Hazan has become a successful cookbook writer himself, and written at length about those Friday night meals they shared as a family. His books continue the age-old tradition of Jewish Italian cuisine, showcasing dishes such as carciofi alla giudia (Jewish-style artichokes) and bimuelos (fried dough balls).

[cinemaocd]

It just occurred to me that Marcella Hazan probably included white wine in her carbonara recipe because she wrote that book in the 70s for the American market, when you sure as hell weren't finding guanciale in stores outside of specialty stores in a handful of cities. She was assuming people would use bacon. The wine adds a punch of acid that you would get from the fermented quality of guanciale which is cured longer than other pork products to give it that unique tang. So I'm going to carry on making carbonara with thick cut bacon and white wine and I'm going to call it "retro."