Want to cook great Italian food? Turn to Marcella Hazan | Angela Hartnett
My grandmother was Italian so, growing up, I knew about Italian food, which made discovering Marcella Hazan as a teenager quite a personal experience. Her Classic Italian Cookbook was one of those books that was passed from family member to member. My mum had a copy, then my aunt got one, and whenever any of us went away to college, we’d get one, too.
It’s a brilliant read, very smartly written and a natural follow-on from the likes of Elizabeth David. Marcella covers everything – she is thorough and traditional; she hasn’t gone all modern, making beetroot risottos and stuff like that. At the same time, she isn’t a purist, stipulating you use only, say, fresh pasta. She will tell you how to cook dry pasta, too, and which sauces work best for it. She is thoroughly instructive.
One of the first dishes I remember making from it was at college. My best mate Lara and I made the stuffed chicken – pollo en piene. I still have a mental image of me with a knife and Lara holding the book going, “Right, next!”, reading out what I needed to do at each stage. You boned the bird, then made a lovely farce with beef mince, pork mince, herbs and onion, then you stuffed that inside and roasted it. We were 19. We really shouldn’t have been stuffing chickens at that stage of our lives, but we did it anyway. I can’t remember what we ate with it – we’re talking 20-30 years ago – but it was delicious.
When she was cooking, my nonna did everything al occhio, as they say, “by the eye”. I would watch her and then go, “All right, now I’m going to read Marcella’s recipe”, to understand the quantities, etc. I still go to her today to double-check these details.
Most of the time, food is a reinvention of itself: certain things always go well with certain things, so it’s worth having this kind of reference book. And any chef who thinks they no longer need to pick up a book and learn something is kidding themselves – because you can’t remember everything. It’s important to go back to the original.
Marcella is also a brilliant place to start for anyone who wants to get into Italian cookery. I never had any formal chef training at college; I very much learned on the job and I think Marcella’s writing complemented what I was learning. Sure, you need to have a bit of knowhow, but I do think she’s a very good teacher. It’s the little details: the fact that you put vinaigrette on a potato salad when the potatoes are still warm so that they absorb the vinegar, and the flavour. She is excellent on cooking vegetables. We’re so obsessed these days with everything looking green, but that also means it’s never cooked. Things have to be cooked so they taste better.
Reading Marcella feels like a conversation, as opposed to anything formulaic. She captures perfectly the region, the produce, the simplicity, without ever overcomplicating things. You sense she takes pleasure in telling you about it all. And you feel she’s someone with whom you could just sit down and have a glass of wine and a good chat. I’m gutted I never met her.
Angela Hartnett is chef patron at Murano restaurant in London