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S39E6: Marcella | Clip

These Italian ingredients didn’t exist in America before Marcella Hazan

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Marcella Hazan introduced classic Italian ingredients to America, including extra virgin olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes. She also introduced balsamic vinegar to the U.S., which she lived to regret for its overuse in cooking.

TRANSCRIPT

- I think we all tend to understate how powerful first time discovery is of things.

When I grew up, we didn't have extra virgin olive oil, we didn't have arugula, we didn't have radicchio, we didn't have every kind of pasta shape under the sun.

- Nobody'd heard of sun-dried tomatoes until Marcella Hazan.

I remember my mother using olive oil and it was sort of something that you would put on your skin when you went in the sun.

- It was only one olive oil in America and it was not extra virgin and was terrible.

- Nobody knew what extra virgin olive oil was and how much better it tasted than what we were used to.

- [Marcella] And we season with extra virgin olive oil.

- Always the extra virgin.

- Yes.

It is the only, the only olive oil is extra virgin.

- Okay.

- Let's go- (audience laughing) - Look who she's talking to, that's right.

- One ingredient after the other, she brought it to America.

- Marcella introduced balsamic vinegar to us.

I think it is something that she lived to regret.

She would use it as a drop of beautiful seasoning, of flavor.

It was valuable and precious, and now anywhere you go you ask for a vinegarette and you have balsamic vinegar.

I remember going to dinner with her and she would cringe with the fact that people served it everywhere.