#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. 

[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.

[selkielore]

dinner & dessert.

marcella hazan sauce w garlic & basil (served w spaghetti & meatballs) and a raspberry chamomile sundae

[kickthecan-revolution]

I woke up refreshed and happy this morning. Walked to Starbucks for some tea, and then stopped by the market for a few things on my way back. I’m trying to cook more - I want to make the NYT hasselbeck potatoes, the Marcella Hazan bolognese sauce and a few more delicious things. I am observing how difficult it is for me to follow a recipe - I doubt it, I think I know better, I’m afraid it’s not going to turn out - so I’m practicing following them strictly, just to not give oxygen to that part of my distrustful brain.

Most of all, I’m feeling so grateful for feeling well.

[foodmyheart]

Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce with bucatini and meatballs Source: https://reddit.com/r/foodporn

http://foodmyheart.tumblr.com | https://campsite.bio/foodmyheart

[positivexcellence]

genpadalecki: when the holidaze hit, nothing beats a warm ’n cozy comfort meal —esp when it involves famed Italian cookbook author marcella hazan’s classic bolognese with sustainable @forcesofnature meat + veggies from the garden. 

(*non-meat eaters may opt for a @beyondmeat crumble or head to our stories for all-veggie alternative) **another pro/cheat tip from @genpadalecki: cooking the sauce for 2 hrs vs 4 hours came out just fine! ⏲️

nowadays, we recognize that it’s important to be mindful of where & how we source our food. force of nature’s meats are procured through regenerative agriculture, which creates nutrient-rich, tasty food that’s free of synthetics, chemicals, hormones or antibiotics. by supporting sustainable, eco-friendly processes, we can all take part in healing ecosystems & boosting land resilience, making our communities – and the planet itself – healthier. 💪🌎

p.s. keep an eye on our stories for a roundup of our fav cookbooks to help inspire your own holiday meals. 📖🥘👀🎄

marcella hazan’s classic bolognese:  1 tbs oil 3 tbs butter + 1 tbs for tossing the pasta ½ c  chopped onion ⅔ c chopped celery ⅔ c chopped carrot ¾ lbs  ground beef  Salt Black pepper 1 c whole milk ⅛ tsp nutmeg 1 c dry white wine 1½ c canned tomatoes, cut up, with their juice 1¼ to 1½ pounds pasta Freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese at the table

Directions: 1. Put oil, butter + onion in the pot and turn the heat to medium. Cook and stir the onion until it’s translucent, then add the celery and carrot. Cook for 2 minutes, stirring to coat them well. 2. Add ground beef, a large pinch of salt & pepper. Crumble the meat with a fork, stir well and cook until the beef has lost its raw, red color. 3. Add milk & let it simmer, stirring frequently, until it has bubbled away completely. Add nutmeg. 4. Add wine, simmer until it has evaporated, then add tomatoes & stir to coat all ingredients. Simmer, uncovered, for 3 hours or more, stirring from time to time. To keep it from sticking, add ½ cup of water whenever necessary. Stir to mix the fat into the sauce, taste and correct for salt. 5. Toss with cooked drained pasta, adding the tbs of butter, & serve with freshly grated parmesan.