Marcella Hazan

Marcella Hazan (née Polini; April 15, 1924 – September 29, 2013) was an Italian cooking writer whose books were published in English. She was considered by chefs and fellow food writers to be the doyenne of Italian cuisine.

Biography Hazan was born in 1924 in the town of Cesenatico in Emilia-Romagna. in natural sciences and biology from the University of Ferrara and the University of Padua. She began her career as a science teacher. In 1955, she married Victor Hazan, an Italian-born, New York-raised Sephardic Jew who subsequently gained fame as a wine writer, and the couple moved to New York City a few months later.

Cooking

Hazan had never cooked before her marriage. As she recounted in the introduction to her 1997 book Marcella Cucina:

She began by using cookbooks from Italy, but then realized that her clear memory of the flavors she had tasted at home allowed her to reproduce them herself. "Eventually I learned that some of the methods I adopted were idiosyncratically my own," she recalled, "but for most of them I found corroboration in the practices of traditional Italian cooks."

Hazan began giving cooking lessons in her apartment and opened her own cooking school, the School of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1969. . She published her first book, The Classic Italian Cook Book, in 1973. In 1980, having been published in a version adapted for a British readership by Anna Del Conte, it won an André Simon Award. A sequel, More Classic Italian Cooking, followed in 1978; the two were collected in one volume, Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, in 1992. Her 1997 book Marcella Cucina won the James Beard Foundation book award for Best Mediterranean Cookbook and the Julia Child Award for Best International Cookbook the following year. She wrote in Italian, and her books were translated by her husband. Her celebrated recipe for Italian tomato sauce is frequently cited by the cooking section of the New York Times.

Among the techniques Hazan suggests are:

Choose vegetables that are in season and plan the entire meal around them. Soak vegetables in cold water for half an hour before cooking to remove all trace of grit. Cook them until they are tender, but not mushy, so that they have a rich flavour. When sautéing onions, put them in a cold pan with oil and heat them gently; this will make them release their flavour gradually and give them a mellower taste than starting them in a hot pan. Although some types of pasta, like tagliatelle, are best made fresh at home, others, like spaghetti, should be bought dried. Pasta should be matched carefully to sauce. Olive oil isn't always the best choice for frying; in delicately flavoured dishes, a combination of butter and vegetable oil should be used. Garlic presses should be avoided at all costs.

Hazan frequently prefaces her recipes with descriptions of how the food is eaten in Italy, or with her own memories of it. For example, her recipe for coffee ice with whipped cream, included in Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, begins:

Hazan helped popularize balsamic vinegar in the USA, something she later regretted because she thought people were overusing it.

Craig Claiborne said of Hazan's work, "No one has ever done more to spread the gospel of pure Italian cookery in America".

In 1998, Hazan retired from her cooking school, and she and Victor moved to Longboat Key, Florida. There Hazan found that she could no longer get some of the Italian ingredients she had taken for granted in New York, and she decided to write a cookbook for people in the same situation. The result was Marcella Says ..., published in 2004.

Hazan taught courses at the French Culinary Institute. In 2003, she was made a Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity.

Marcella Hazan died from complications of emphysema at her home in Longboat Key on September 29, 2013. a documentary about her by filmmaker Peter Miller was released. It won the James Beard Award for Best Documentary. It premiered on PBS American Masters on July 11, 2025.

Awards

Maria Luigia, Duchess of Parma, Gold Medal (Italy) James Beard Foundation's Who's Who of Food and Beverage in America, 1986 Silver Spoon Award from Food Arts magazine, 1992 (with Victor Hazan) Golden Cheese Knife, 1997 (Italy) James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2000 Cavaliere della Stella della Solidarietà Italiana (Knight of the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity), Italy, 2003 Lifetime Achievement Award, International Association of Culinary Professionals, 2004