Amarcord by Marcella Hazan

Author:Marcella Hazan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2010-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

1980, London. The Classic Italian Cook Book in the window of Hatchard’s on Piccadilly

A Funny Thing Happened

1973-1975

IN THE FALL of the year my book was published, I was invited to do a demonstration on the Joyce Brothers television show. The producer looked through the cookbook and chose a recipe for striped bass stuffed with several kinds of shellfish and baked sealed in foil. I had five minutes in which to bone the fish; stuff it with clams, mussels, oysters, and shrimp; wrap it in foil; remove from the oven a similar fish previously prepared and already cooked; unwrap it and slice it, all the while chatting with Dr. Brothers, who was expected to drop in a plug for my book. Just to bone the fish would have taken me twenty minutes, so I boned it at home; then I put the bone back in its place and closed the fish over it. When I was on camera I opened up the fish, I went through the motions of running a knife under the bone, and presto! Off came the whole bone in just seconds.

There was another guest cooking, Enzo Stuarti, a Mario Lanza-style tenor who was going to cook spaghetti. The precooked spaghetti was in a pot of still-boiling water. The pot had a perforated insert for draining cooked pasta, a metal basket that Stu-arti

With Dr. Joyce Brothers, my first television appearance

lifted and carried past me with scalding water still dripping from it. He let it drip all over my feet. It was my first time on television, but it became the last time that I allowed a producer to choose what I was to demonstrate, and the last time I shared a cooking segment with anyone else.

Like others who have been nurtured by the settled life of a small town, I have never felt a strong urge to expand my habitat. I am not a self-promoter, but New York is a bellows that can fan great flames from small sparks. In the year that my cookbook was published, I was invited to dinners and parties, and in a few months, I had met nearly everyone in, or at the margins of, the city’s food world. I immediately felt strong empathy for and from James Beard. I was startled at first by the open-air shower that he had in the back of his house on West Twelfth Street, but I soon understood that it wasn’t crude exhibitionism; it was a manifestation of his natural candor, of his aversion to cover-ups. I was amazed by what he knew and remembered. He was my living encyclopedia: Whenever I had a question, he had the answer. He had a sonorous voice that he used as a foil for the mischief in his eyes. His laugh was magnificent, rising from deep within his capacious belly. An example of it still rings in my memory’s ears. Sometime after we had become friends, we were both giving cooking classes in Italy, Jim at the Gritti Palace in Venice and I at my school in Bologna.

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