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S39E6: Marcella | Clip

How Marcella Hazan published her first cookbook

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In the early 70s, an editor reached out to Marcella Hazan to write a cookbook. Hesistant because she didn’t write in English, her husband Victor offered to help translate the book for her. Within a year, the two delivered “The Classic Italian Cook Book,” which is now considered “the most seminal Italian cookbook ever published in this country.”

TRANSCRIPT

- Marcella gets another call from this man named Peter Mollman who is an editor at Harper & Row, a publishing house.

(gentle music) - They said, would you like to do a cookbook?

A cookbook?

- I decided it was impossible because I don't write in English.

And Victor said, "Well, if you want, I will translate."

But I didn't know anything about writing a book, especially a cookbook, believe me.

- They agreed that they would deliver within a year.

And somehow, with Victor working full-time, and Marcella, not really being able to write in English, figured out a way between the two of them to produce a cookbook.

- I had a portable typewriter set up in the living room.

She liked to work with a spiral notebook that I would make little notes for myself.

Then I would disappear, and I would work away until maybe two or three in the morning and then go to work, then come back in the evening and go to work again.

And in less than a year, we had produced a book, A book that's made history.

- And "Classic Italian Cook Book" is one of the most brilliant Italian cookbooks ever done, and probably the most seminal Italian cookbook ever published in this country.

- "The Classic Italian Cook Book" was something that every interested cook, amateur, professional, simply had to have.

- So I think the very first book of hers I bought was "The Classic Italian Cook Book."

I read the first few pages and this whole front preface, which is pretty long, the art of Italian edith, it goes into detail and how we do certain things and why we don't do certain things.

And as you started to sort of build up in your brain, you know, as someone with a scientific background, this is like almost forming my own periodic table of Italian food.

- Marcella begins by, you know, declaring that Italian food does not really exist.

(soft music) - [Narrator] The cooking of Italy is really the cooking of its regions, regions that until 1861 were separate, independent, and usually hostile states.

What is important is to be aware that these differences exist, and that behind the screen of the two familiar term, Italian cooking, lies concealed, waiting to be discovered, a multitude of riches.