It’s 10:17 on an autumn night, and Facebook Messenger says Marcella Hazan has been active in the last hour. It can’t be true, since the famed cookbook author and cooking teacher died nine years ago. Marcella, the forceful presence who brought “simple, true” Italian cooking to American households, was 89. Her husband, Victor, was always by her side.
It’s easy to imagine an alternate universe where the one-name phenomenon Marcella never existed, where American cooks found some other path to homemade Bolognese or three-ingredient tomato sauce or milk-braised pork. The first fork in that road would be the day in 1952 that Victor Hazan visited Italy’s Adriatic coast.
“I worked all day (in advertising, originally in his parents’ furrier business), and in the evening I came home. I had a little portable typewriter,” he said. “Marcella made dinner. It was always wonderful. And I got up from the table after dinner and I went to the bedroom” to type there until 1 or 2 in the morning.