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S39E6: Marcella | Clip

How Marcella Hazan accidentally became a teacher

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In 1969, Marcella Hazan enrolled in a cooking class taught by Grace Zia Chu. Madame Chu decided to take a sabbatical on the first day of class, and with the other students’ encouragement, Marcella stepped in to teach the students Italian cooking instead. Thus began the start of Marcella’s long teaching career.

TRANSCRIPT

- My father had developed a fondness for Chinese cooking.

At that time, there was a famous restaurant in New York run by a woman called Pearl.

So my father would take us out there.

Marcella tasted this food and said, "Boy, this is really delicious.

"I wish I knew how to make this."

- Marcella decides to enroll in a Chinese cooking class taught by a renowned cooking teacher and cookbook author named Grace Zia Chu.

And so Marcella gets there on the first day and right after the first session Madame Chu announces that she wants to take a sabbatical and so she will no longer be teaching that class.

And so Marcella and her fellow students are like, "Wait, so what do we do now?"

- Then the other women in the class loved Marcella so much, and they said, "Why don't you teach us Italian cooking?"

- So they asked me to teach, which I thought that they were crazy.

- But Victor encourages her and he says, "Well, you know, you were a teacher back in Italy, "you do have these skills and you're quite a good cook, "so why not do it?"

And so in the late 1960s, Marcella decides to begin teaching Italian cooking to American women.

- I had been a rock and roll writer and editor.

I decided I was sick of that.

A friend of mine in the city said, "Oh, there's this wonderful Italian cooking teacher, "Marcella Hazan, "I'm taking her class and she has another class "and somebody dropped out, you could get in."

So I immediately signed up.

She and Victor lived on 76th Street, very small apartment with a tiny kitchen.

There were six people in the class, we gathered around her dining room table.

What she taught us and me is what food should taste like.

I remember we were making veal milanese and I said to her, "Marcella, how hot should the oil be for it?"

And she grabbed my hand, held it like that far from the hot oil, and said, "That's how hot, feel it."

She was tough.